


I dream of gardens in the desert sand

by baeconandeggs, silvercompass



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe – Post-Apocalypse, Angst and Tragedy, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Manipulation, Heavy Themes, M/M, Minor Byun Baekhyun/Zhang Yixing | Lay, Minor Characters Death, Minor Unrequited Byun Baekhyun/Kim Jongdae | Chen, Minor Violence, Morally Ambiguous Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:08:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24479245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baeconandeggs/pseuds/baeconandeggs, https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvercompass/pseuds/silvercompass
Summary: Baekhyun has responsibilities towards his clan and the children he took in. He also has hopes and dreams he knows he will never be able to fulfill. Longing for something to brighten his dull life, he meets Chanyeol.--------“Aren’t you afraid of me?” Chanyeol had asked him.“I’m not,” Baekhyun had answered him with little hesitation, and he had not lied. If Chanyeol would be his downfall, then so be it. He needed flowers in his life, and Chanyeol appeared to be the sweetest one of all.
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Park Chanyeol
Comments: 34
Kudos: 93
Collections: BAE2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:** BAE487  
>  **Disclaimer: baeconandeggs/the mods is/are not the author/s of this story. Authors will be credited and tagged after reveals.** The celebrities' names/images are merely borrowed and do not represent who the celebrities are in real life. No offense is intended towards them, their families or friends. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this fictional work. No copyright infringement is intended.
> 
> **Author's Note:** To the readers: this story contains some heavy themes, so please do read the tags before proceeding. The setting of this story is loosely inspired by the lives of the nomadic people of Central Asia. The story does not reflect their actual customs and/or traditions. The title comes from the song Desert Rose by Sting.  
> To the prompter: this is probably not the story you had in mind when you sent in your prompt, but I took your invitation to go wild with it at heart. I hope you will like the story anyway :)
> 
> To the mods: thank you for organizing this fest. This is my first time taking part in it and I enjoyed myself immensely.
> 
> To my beta moonyki: I will never be able to thank you enough for how much you have helped and supported me through the past months. This story wouldn’t be half as good without your precious suggestions.
> 
> To Chris: you were the first who read the first chapter of this story, thank you for your encouragement and your friendship <3
> 
> To Marti: thank you for always believing in me. I love you.

“Once upon a time there lived a race of men unlike any other, giants who had tamed metal and bent it to their will. They rode beasts of fire and didn’t feel the heat of the scorching sun on their skin, nor the biting cold of the night winds. They built houses out of stone and mortar so tall they reached the sky and tickled the clouds. They were a happy lot, for they had all they could ever wish for.

But do you know what they had forgotten?”

Baekhyun’s eyes swept from one child to another, taking in their avid expressions, meeting their eyes filled with wonder, their tiny hands closed into fists of anticipation.

One squeaky voice piped up from the entrance of the tent, knees dirty with grass stains: “They had forgotten to worship the Mother!”

“Right! But, Sehunnie, don’t think I will forget this is the third time you arrive late in so many days just because you got an answer right!”

The titters of the other children at the sight of Sehun’s rapidly warming face earned them a withering glare and a sticking tongue before the child came sitting down on the mat beside Jongin under Baekhyun’s invitation.

“As Sehun rightly said, the giants who ruled this land had indeed forgotten to worship Our Mother!” Baekhyun paused to enjoy the astonished looks on his children’s sweet faces and their little yells of dissent, for it was unthinkable to them not to worship the Mother as She deserved.

After calming down their spirits with a few chosen words - and the promise of a piece of dried meat at the end of the tale if they behaved -, Baekhyun resumed his narration.

“Temples were in ruin and no one had offered Her milk and honey in many, many moons. She had grown weak and sad. Had Her children really forsaken Her? She who had been a loving Mother, She who danced with flowers in Her hair?”

Little Jongin sported the most precious pouting frown on his mouth, his brows furrowed in ferocious disapproval.

“What men did not know was that other deities were spying upon them with their covetous eyes, for they were greedy and envious, and they could not bear the thought of mortal creatures rising up to the skies while they were held in dark caves where no life dwelled, caves our Great Mother had imprisoned them in.”

A few of the children now looked scared and dragged themselves closer to where Baekhyun was sitting, seeking his comfort.

“Bats, the only creatures under their command, flew down into the dark recesses of the earth and told them that the Mother had not been seen in a long time, that Her children were vain and ungrateful and had forgotten how to pray. Insane at the thought of finally being able to regain their freedom and the control over the inhabited surface, the dark gods broke the chains that held them down – weakened by the Mother’s sleep -, flew out of their dwellings and spread out upon our world like a black plague, devastating all they came across.”

The silence inside the dim-lighted tent was absolute. Only the loud bleating of the sheep could be heard in the background together with the stomping of horses. The shepherds were back, thought Baekhyun.

“Humanity was in despair: the dark gods devoured everything, their sharp claws digging into soft flesh and ripping it apart. The earth was drenched in blood.”

A couple of the youngest children were crying; miserable, fat tears rolling down their chubby cheeks. Baekhyun felt a pang in his heart at such a sad sight, but he could not stop telling their story, the most important story of all. It was the only way his people had not to repeat the same mistakes a second time.

“When everything seemed lost, a miracle happened. The children who were good, and pure, and whose hearts were still open to the love of their Mother, started to sing Her songs to feel Her warmth once again, and their love was so strong they gave Her just enough strength to drive the evil gods back into their dark dwellings.”

Loud cheers erupted inside the tent, the children mad with joy: they saw themselves in the children who had rescued their Mother and were now gushing with pride.

“The Mother is asleep now. She gave everything in Her power to save us and contain those foul creatures. We must wait for Her, for much was lost in those dark days, but not the hearts of those who still believed in Her. She is recovering, and the earth with her, but one day She will come back to us, flower-scented and with eyes the color of moist soil. We must always keep Her in our prayers, children. She gave us back a humble life to teach us what really matters: not riches, nor big houses as tall as the sky, but pureness of heart, and the ability to appreciate what Earth gives us freely allowing us to survive.”

He paused to swallow the lump in his throat. He couldn’t remember how many times he had told this story to the children of his clan, but each time felt like the first.

“We live a hard life, that is true. But don’t fear, She will be back, and with her: flowers, and trees, and all the animals we have lost. Like bees, with their sweet honey that we will offer to Her, or the big cats, with eyes that can see in the darkest of nights and teeth as long and sharp as honed stones.”

He hugged Jongin close to his chest, the small child had almost dozed off suckling his thumb. He gave a big smile to the children around him, watching them with pride. He wasn’t their father, but he might just as well be, for many of them had lost their parents to their harsh life, and Baekhyun had taken them, the most precious treasure of their clan, under his protection.

“We will not be alone anymore then.”

“Jongdae!”

Baekhyun ran to greet his best friend back from the pasture. Running, he couldn’t help but watch out of the corner of his eye the children shooting out of his tent and scattering around camp, the oldest of the lot carrying in her arms a ball made out of goatskin and stuffed with rags.

He grabbed the reins of Jongdae’s horse, patting it gently on its snout while his friend dismounted with such grace Baekhyun had never been able to emulate. He led the horse back into its paddock where it started munching on some grass it found there, all the while Jongdae silent at his side.

They stopped to watch the horses for a while, carefully taking in any tiny change in their stride, any neigh that could signal that something was wrong. Their horses were their most prized beasts, essential to their survival almost as much as their sheep and goats. A couple of mares had just had one foal each the past week, the small creatures already quick on their feet. They looked healthy, and Baekhyun hoped they would remain so even in the upcoming cold season.

With a gentle tug at the sleeve of his long shirt, Jongdae grabbed his attention back, signaling, with a nod of his head, to follow him back to his tent, the one he shared with other young men who had yet to marry. Baekhyun would have probably shared it too in another life, had his father not died so young and left the guidance of their clan on Baekhyun’s shoulders. He now occupied the tent that had been his parents’, a comfortable home for him and the children he had taken under his wing: little Jongin, with his shy smiles and a penchant for falling in love with every animal under the sun; Sehunnie, the youngest and brattiest of the lot, who needed ten kisses on his forehead before he could fall asleep; Kyungsoo who, at six years old, had taken upon himself the duties of the oldest brother, and Narae, the only girl, as small as a mouse and just as quiet, who had lost her parents the past winter.

Jongdae opened the flap of his tent and ushered him inside; they were alone.

They sat down on a threadbare woolen rug, weaved with care by Jongdae’s mother many years ago. In silence, they shared a cup of fresh milk, the only thing their tribe had plenty of.

Only when their cups were empty and their bellies full they started talking.

“We might have to change pasture soon; the animals have been going farther and farther away to find food. At this point, it would be better to move the entire camp,” Jongdae said, removing his beret. He had a line on his forehead that marked where his skin stopped being protected from the sun: it looked like a half-moon turned upside down. 

“So soon? I thought we could last the entire season. The other men said there was a field on the other side of the hills, still untouched—”

Jongdae shook his head. “It dried up last week. We need to move.”

Baekhyun sighed, resigned. Lately, it was happening more and more frequently: fields suddenly drying up, despite the apparent abundance of water in their region. Baekhyun suspected it had to do with the acrid rain that had been falling recently, brought to them by winds blowing from the west. Baekhyun wondered what lurked there, what kind of unspeakable disaster had befallen those who called those lands their home.

“I’ll inform the others, but they won’t be happy about this.”

Jongdae smiled a bitter smile. “Are they ever?”

Moving didn’t take a lot of work, to be quite honest, so Baekhyun wasn’t that worried. After all, their people didn’t know anything different: living in a region where agriculture was not possible – living in a _world_ where most edible plant species had been wiped out -, meant that the only source of nourishment came from animals. Goats and sheep provided them everything they needed, and the foraging of a few wild plants did the rest. Moving was their only chance at survival. 

Sometimes, a couple of times a year, a merchant would come with camels laden with things they would not be able to find otherwise: pottery, fabrics, metal scraps scavenged in the ruins of a faraway ghost city.

Most of all, Baekhyun liked to exchange stories in return for a flask of milk or a piece of hard cheese. How was life beyond their steppes, how did people live beyond the great sea of grass?

Baekhyun had always been a dreamer, too curious for his own good: his father used to say that he reminded him of a small puppy, always running around camp, sticking his nose where he wasn’t supposed to. Life had beaten some of that curiosity out of him, but he couldn’t help assaulting the merchants with a thousand questions when he had the occasion. Their answers were not always as thorough as he would have liked; he didn’t know if it was because they didn’t want to share what they knew or if they really didn’t know much.

He noticed how the younger ones were more prone to speak with him at length, maybe finding pleasure in satisfying his curiosity, but the elders were reluctant, eyes tired in their wrinkled faces. But sometimes a few caved in – the few who had the most fantastical stories to tell - and Baekhyun was assaulted by the tales of far-away places, his imagination running free hearing of people who had made their homes inside hills to escape from the too intense heat, or people who lived inside mud huts, with roofs made out of straw.

Sometimes, if he was lucky, a merchant would describe to him a flower or an animal that he had never seen, a creature that had escaped the famished jaws of the dark gods. The merchant used words Baekhyun had never heard before because he had never needed them to describe the land and the animals that he called his own. But still, he listened, avid, and memorized everything.

After exiting Jongdae’s tent, he walked towards the southern part of the encampment, passing by his people busy at work: some of the women were prone before big wooden buckets filled to the brim with water, now murky after all the clothes that had been washed in it; a thin rope had been stretched between the poles of two tents and all kind of garments were hanging from it, oscillating lightly under the soft breeze.

Inside another tent he spied a couple of women weaving heavy woolen blankets, two toddlers running around at their feet. They were the only ones who had survived the winter. His clan had never felt smaller, with only fifty people occupying the tents, and no new pregnancies in sight.

Finally, he reached his destination: a stream running past their last tent, just a rill of muddy water formed by the rains of the past month. There were a few sheep drinking on its shore, and Baekhyun could glimpse in the far distance a small herd of gazelles grazing on the plain. His people had stopped hunting them long ago, hoping that they might grow in number, but nature seemed hell-bent on keeping them on the verge of extinction.

Raising his eyes, he searched the mid-morning sky for one speck of brown among the milky clouds, and once he caught sight of it, he extended his left arm, protected from elbow to wrist by a thick leather vambrace, towards it.

A sheer cry announced the rapid descent of the animal Baekhyun had been looking for: in a flurry of wings, a majestic hawk landed on Baekhyun’s arm, grabbing it in his lethal talons; the coarse leather protected the soft skin underneath well enough, and a thorough training did the rest.

“Balam, it’s time to move.”

By the time Baekhyun went back to the encampment, Jongdae must have informed their people of his decision, for he found it in a flurry of activity: the women were busy folding rugs and putting clothes inside voluminous bags, while the men were quickly and efficiently dismantling the tents one by one, each precious piece of fabric carefully folded and loaded on the back of the few yaks at their disposal.

Even the kids were keeping busy collecting their few toys scattered on the ground and putting out fires; a couple of them were intent on picking small yellow flowers that grew just beside Baekhyun’s tent under their healer’s careful watch.

“Suhunnie, be careful to collect the roots, too, we need them to--”

“--to cure the cold!” Jongin piped up; his pudgy fingers dirty with soil had left brown streaks on his cheeks, but Baekhyun didn’t mind cleaning him up – sometimes multiple times a day – when he was so happy spending time with Junmyeon learning about plants. Sehun didn’t like learning as much as Jongin did, but he didn’t mind Junmyeon’s company: with him, he was allowed to get as dirty as possible playing in the dirt and no one could tell him off for it.

Junmyeon regaled him with a proud smile and a pat on his shoulder. “Exactly,” he told him. Then, noticing Baekhyun’s approach, he greeted him with a quick nod. “Someone’s looking for you,” he told the kids.

Sehun and Jongin whirled around and Baekhyun would never get enough of seeing their precious little faces lighting up in a smile that was only for him.

“Daddy!” Jongin yelled, running to him with a bunch of yellow flowers held tightly in his fist. He ran so fast that he tripped on his feet but was saved from faceplanting on the ground by instead faceplanting against Baekhyun’s leg. He giggled and stretched his arms towards Baekhyun in a clear request of being picked up. Bowing at the knees, ignoring Balam’s loud displeased squawk in his ear, Baekhyun grabbed Jongin by under his knees and lifted him up, bringing him to his hip. The child held on tightly, one arm around Baekhyun’s neck, his bouquet of wildflowers tickling Baekhyun’s nose and causing him to let out three little sneezes in a row.

“It seems like those flowers don’t agree with you,” Junmyeon joked, Sehun still at his side.

“Ah, it appears not! Did you know that, Jonginnie? Did you do it _on purpose_?” He jostled him a bit, enjoying his carefree laugh, but that had to be too much for his hawk because, at last, he took flight and landed on top of a pole, his disdain for being so carelessly treated obvious when he turned his tail to his owner.

“I didn’t, I didn’t! Daddy, I didn’t!”

Now that Baekhyun’s hand was free, he took much joy in tickling Jongin’s tummy, the little boy squirming like a fish out of water in his arms.

Pouting at the sight before him, Sehun was still by the healer’s side, pretending to be very much engrossed in the last flowers Junmyeon was picking up and not at all interest in his father and brother’s games. The small satchel he brought on his hip was still half-way empty, so, attempting to be useful, he extended it towards Junmyeon, who looked at him with a knowing smile and started filling it to the brim with the last flowers he had gathered. Once full, he profusely thanked Sehun for his help, the little boy lighting up at the praise.

Despite his children believing otherwise, Baekhyun could be very observant and had instantly sensed that Sehun was in one of his moods. At first, the boy had smiled seeing him and had almost started running together with his brother, but then he had stopped in his tracks as if remembering something that turned his smile into a huffy moue.

“Junmyeon, have my children behaved today?” He shared a complicit glance with Junmyeon, and spied with the corner of his eye Sehun appearing very interested in what the answer would be, while Jongin seemed more interested in picking a hole on the shoulder of Baekhyun’s shirt, widening it just for his own amusement.

“They were great,” Junmyeon replied. And they truly had been. “Jonginnie is really good at remembering the names of the plants.” Hearing that, Jongin perked up in Baekhyun’s arms, his feet kicking out in glee. “And Sehunnie… There is no one better than him at picking up flowers without ruining them.”

The bright smile that bloomed on Sehun’s small face was worth a thousand stars to Baekhyun. The child threw a smug look his way as if to say _“see, Dad? I did good!”_.

Sehun was such a conundrum of laziness and neediness to please and be praised; sometimes, for a four-year-old child, it was hard to balance the two. There wasn’t time for idleness in their hard life, though Baekhyun wished he could allow his children to sleep a little more in the mornings, to play all day without a care in the world. Sehun knew that, but he found it the hardest thing in the world to show up on time for his morning lessons. Apart from that, he was a good boy, he listened well, and nothing gave him as much joy as helping others.

“Good job, both of you!” And it was with those words that Sehun finally walked closer to his father, hugging him around his waist. Baekhyun circled his bony shoulders with his free arm, and squeezed a tiny bit, just enough for Sehun to understand that he wasn’t mad about him being late for his lessons that morning.

“Let’s go look for Kyungsoo and Narae, alright? We need to pack up our things.”

Sehun nodded against his hip and grabbed a couple of his fingers in his small hand, dragging him towards where Baekhyun presumed he had last seen his siblings.

“Can Balam come with us too?” Jongin asked. He had always had an insane fascination with the hawk, something that Sehun didn’t share at all. He was actually a little bit scared of the fierce animal despite Baekhyun’s many attempts at trying to get Sehun to bond with him. Kyungsoo and Narae didn’t care that much about the bird, preferring to play with the couple of dogs they kept around to help them with the livestock.

The hawk didn’t seem particularly inclined on leaving his post, maybe mindful of a couple of times Jongin had pulled off some of his plumage in his childlike enthusiasm.

“I think Balam prefers to stay here and look after our tent, alright? We will be back soon anyway.”

Jongin nodded, but his eyes never left the brooding bird perched above ground. Sehun, on the contrary, seemed to have gladly received the news and was now skipping along Baekhyun, singing an old folk song under his breath.

They were almost back at the center of the camp when Jongin screamed in Baekhyun’s ear: “Daddy, wait! The flowers!” He had forgotten to give the plants back to Junmyeon and he was now waving them above Baekhyun’s head, a rainfall of delicate yellow petals falling on their hair and shoulders. Baekhyun had to bring Jongin back to their tent, where he handed the flowers back to a very amused Junmyeon.

The long column of men and animals proceeded through the vast plain guided by Jongdae and their youngest shepherds, the ones who knew where to lead the clan and their beasts in search of a more fertile piece of land. They needed a lot of grass to feed their animals and to turn it into hay before the cold arrived.

The sheep and the goats followed the shepherds on their horses and were flanked by their yipping dogs keeping the flock together. After them came the yaks, five strong beasts carrying on their back most of the clan’s belongings. A couple of them dragged the only cart in the clan’s possession, a rickety old thing Baekhyun was afraid would give out at any moment under the combined weight of the heavy fabrics that made their tents, and their twelve kids, who took great delight in riding on top of it.

The rest of his people closed the column carrying heavy bags on their shoulders, but, despite this, looked merry and content. Baekhyun closed the line, his duty that of keeping an eye on everyone, while his hawk monitored them from above, circling around the convoy and diving once or twice to make a snack out of a poor, distracted mouse.

They were heading towards the gentle hills up in the north and then down in the valley between, where the grass was fresh and the water still abundant. If everything went as it should, the plan was to remain there until the end of the summer months and then go back south, to the usual place they had been spending the winter in since before Baekhyun’s father took the role of their chief.

Had the plains always been so silent? Everything was so quiet, so still, Baekhyun could hear the laughter of the men up at the front, the huffing of their horses, the hooves of the yaks striking the ground…

“Baekhyun?”

Without Baekhyun noticing, Haein, wife of Beomseok, had sidled up to him, taking him by surprise. She was such a small thing, only twenty-five summers old, but a few wrinkles had already cut through her face, some speaking of laughter, more of strain. She was straining under the weight of the bag she brought on her shoulders, but Baekhyun knew better than offering her his help: his people were a proud lot, the women even more so than the men. They had to be; there was no other choice in their harsh world than taking pride in every little thing. Their pride was the only thing they had. That, and their animals.

“Haein,” he replied, self-conscious. He didn’t like the thought of having been caught unaware, nor the shrewd look Haein was taking him in with.

“One of the goats is limping, did you see?” She pointed her finger to one of the last goats in the line, one Baekhyun could barely glimpse through the see of legs and hooves. Her tone sounded vaguely accusatory, but then again, he shouldn’t have been surprised that Haein had been the one to point it out to him. There was nothing Haein loved more than goats, he thought. Maybe not even her children.

“I see it now. Thank you, Haein.” She nodded in acknowledgment and hurried up ahead, rejoining her husband.

“Goat for dinner tonight,” he sighed. He didn’t much like goat meat.

After stopping for the night, they arrived at their destination a little before midday the next day.

Just as the shepherds had told Baekhyun, the grass was green and plenty, and their animals seemed to know it, for they started bleating in happiness. The children were just as happy and didn’t waste any time before quickly stepping off the cart and rolling around on the ground, shrieking when a particularly mischievous blade of grass tickled them behind their ears or under their uncovered knees.

The laughter was infectious, and soon enough everyone was in a much better mood than before; Baekhyun thought that arriving in a new place, while somehow representing the repetition of actions done a thousand times by his people and their ancestors, still held a character of novelty: there was so much land to explore, and the mountains in the distance seemed to call Baekhyun to their depths.

He left his children playing around in the grass with their dogs and the other kids and went over to help the men setting up their tents, while the women were busy putting up a new fence to hold their livestock.

Balam was nowhere to be seen.

The night came quickly and while tired and sleepy, the people were happy and satisfied; the new place seemed perfect for their needs, and they had managed to settle down well near a stream of clearish water.

They had lighted up a fire – the poor, crippled goat roasting merrily over it -, and Baekhyun was, for once, enjoying the stories told by someone who wasn’t himself. Jongin was snuggling at his side, sleepy, but refusing to go to bed just yet. He wanted to celebrate their new home with all of them, and he didn’t want to appear weaker than Sehun, who was stoically sitting up straight on the other side of Baekhyun, his eyes fixed on the bonfire, his mouth still dirty with meat juice. What Jongin couldn’t see though, was the slight, undulating movement Sehun was desperately trying to hide, but that Baekhyun could see very clearly and be incredibly amused by.

“Come here,” he murmured and tugged Sehun towards his lap. The kid collapsed instantly, laying his head on his father’s knees, and sighed contentedly before falling asleep. Baekhyun caressed his youngest children’s hair, while his gaze searched for his two runaways and found them busy playing a game of marbles with Byungjoon’s kid, the man’s wife keeping an eye on them without being too obvious about it.

As sometimes it was wont to do, Baekhyun’s heart lurched in his chest at the sight of a woman taking care of his children. Was he taking something from them raising them alone? Was he depriving them of something as fundamental as the love of a mother?

His children had come to him as a blessing; he had chosen to take them in, to care for them as if they were his own, and he had never regretted his choice once. They enriched him and his life more than anything else could ever do. They _were_ his life. And for that very reason, he wished he could give them the world. Sometimes he thought he wasn’t enough, that his love couldn’t replace the one they had lost when their parents had died.

He wished he could give them a mother, he wished he could take a woman into his tent, into his heart, into his bed, but the curves of a female body had never excited him, not even once, not even when, as kids, he and his friends had spied over a group of girls taking a bath in a warm pool of water.

He had laughed with all the other boys, but the ruddiness in his cheeks hadn’t been due to excitement, but rather to shame, because, for the first time, he had been aware that something was wrong with him, and that the dreams he had had at night that had made him feel hot and wet in his pants, had had nothing to do with the pleasure found in a girl’s body, but very much to do with the sweating bodies of his male companions he had started noticing as soon as puberty had hit him.

While Baekhyun was brooding over his thoughts, Sehun whimpered in his sleep, his lithe body trembling a little at Baekhyun’s side. It was getting colder despite the fire still merrily burning away in its pit, so Baekhyun thought it was time to put his children to bed.

He tried to get up without displacing Sehun and Jongin too much, mindful of not letting their heads bump against the ground, but Jongin had turned into a little monkey and was clinging so tightly to Baekhyun’s leg it was impossible to move him. With an amused huff, Baekhyun was about to shake Jongin awake, because there wasn’t any other way for him to get up, but before he could do that, Jongdae appeared at his side and, with a teasing smile on his lips, he gathered Jongin up in his arms, leaving Sehun to Baekhyun’s care.

There wasn’t any need to call over to his two other children because, as soon as Narae spied her father getting up, she tugged on Kyungsoo’s sleeve and dragged him to Baekhyun’s side, ignoring her sibling’s displeased grumblings.

The little family plus Jongdae soon enough reached the tent that had been put up just a few hours before, and while Baekhyun was busy tucking his children into their beds, Jongdae rekindled the fire that had been dying out in its pit at the center of the tent, a small billow of smoke rising up to the ceiling and escaping to the sky by a hole in the roof.

“Will you come back to the bonfire?” Jongdae asked, despite already knowing Baekhyun’s answer. He came closer to Baekhyun and put an arm on his shoulder, squeezing it lightly.

Baekhyun could feel his face flushing, so he escaped from his friend’s hold and got back to the fire, hoping that it would justify his suddenly warming face. He had since long come to terms with his hopeless infatuation; despite that, his body seemed to be unable not to react in the most inconvenient ways at his friend’s close proximity.

“I can’t,” he replied to Jongdae without looking him in the eyes. He knew already what kind of expression he would find on his handsome face and he couldn’t stand to see it once more. “I have to look after them.”

Jongdae sighed, defeated, and, silently, left Baekhyun to his own devices.

Baekhyun’s eyes followed him as long as he could and, when he disappeared, he could no longer hide the tears that started pooling in his eyes. He bit his lips, and sat down on the floor, sniffling loudly.

“Daddy…”

Jongin. Had he woken him?

Baekhyun cleared his throat and put a smile on his face, before turning towards the mat Jongin was sleeping on. The little boy was barely visible under the cover he had snuggled in, but his eyes reflected the light of the fire. Baekhyun thanked the Goddess his face was in shadows so that his boy couldn’t see the redness in his eyes nor the fakeness of his smile.

“What is it, Jonginnie? You should be asleep, it’s very late.”

“Are you crying, Daddy?”

“Ah, no, little one, do not worry. Maybe I’ve caught a cold.”

Jongin studied him for a bit, even going as far as poking his upper body out of the cover. Then, determined, he rummaged under it and, with a triumphant smile, he pulled out his most treasured possession.

“You can have Momo if you want, Daddy. He’ll help you heal!”

Ah, his little Jongin.

Momo was a doll Baekhyun had made for him last winter; it had a body made out of straw, and a little dress made out of a piece of fabric Baekhyun had begged the women for. He had drawn a cheery smile and two button eyes on its round face.

Now Baekhyun was tearing up again. He kneeled by the side of Jongin’s mat, taking the doll the boy was offering him.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said, caressing Jongin’s dark hair.

Satisfied, the boy soon went back to sleep, while Baekhyun looked over him. Jongin had always been the most sensitive out of all his children, demonstrating time and time again an uncanny ability to sense when someone was feeling down or was torn up by dark thoughts. Baekhyun worried about him the most because the world they lived in was not so kind towards sensitive souls.

He laid down at Jongin’s side, kissing him on the forehead. He put the doll back under his son’s arm, and he unconsciously tightened his grip on it, seeking its comfort while asleep.

Baekhyun could still hear laughter coming from outside, though muffled by the tent’s heavy fabrics.

He would recognize Jongdae’s laughter among hundreds.

Oh, how things would be different if only Baekhyun’s love wasn’t one-sided, if only he could share his life with Jongdae. There was no point in dreaming about impossible things, Baekhyun knew it, but sometimes, in the darkness of his tent, in the quiet of his own mind, he allowed himself to dream of a better life for himself and his children, of a life he wished he could share with someone he loved.

There was not a time that he could recall when he hadn’t loved Jongdae. Not even knowing that his friend would never return his feelings had ever stopped his heart from beating a little bit faster when in his presence.

Baekhyun had tried to make it stop, had tried to be like all the other boys. He had kissed a girl or two, once for a dare, the second out of desperation. Neither of those kisses had made him forget the excitement the sight of a well-sculpted pair of arms aroused in him, nor the curls of Jongdae’s lips.

After those disastrous attempts had come his father’s death, Baekhyun’s subsequent rise as his people’s chief, his children, and all those things had occupied his mind for a while, long enough for him to put aside his personal woes and think of his people’s needs. But everything had come crashing down a couple of summers ago when the warm wind from the south had brought with it the scent of unknown flowers and a man who called himself Yixing.

Yixing was a merchant, someone who, like Baekhyun, had spent his entire life on the move, but that, unlike Baekhyun, had seen all that the world had to offer and then some.

Baekhyun had been instantly fascinated by him: everything about Yixing was new and different, from his brightly colored clothes to the tattoos decorating his arms. He spoke Baekhyun’s language with a lilting accent, sometimes mixing a word or two, and, when Baekhyun had asked him just how many different languages he spoke, Yixing had told him that he knew several and that he wished to learn more and more because learning the languages allowed him to better understand the men… and to sell them just what their hearts yearned for.

He had been open about his life, about all the things he had seen, and Baekhyun had been elated by it: Yixing had stayed with them for three days, and every free moment Baekhyun had, he had spent it with him, bothering him with a thousand questions. He couldn’t seem to be able to quench his thirst, for every answer brought forth another question. But Yixing was a good man, a kind one, one of the kindest Baekhyun had ever met, and he loved telling stories; he had told Baekhyun of a city down by the sea, its inhabitants’ skin dried by the salt and brown from the unforgiving sun. They were more like fish than men and could swim underwater for the longest time without needing to come up for air.

Then, at Baekhyun’s request, he had described to him what the sea was like, with its big waves and white foam, with its islands of waste floating on its surface. The fish-men were the only ones able to withstand its dark waters, for every other human’s skin would be ruined by it. There were monsters living underneath, with long arms and legs and eyes as big as Baekhyun’s head. They had a taste for the fish-men’s flesh, but despite this, the fish-men could not stray away from the sea, for it was the only home they knew. Baekhyun had felt sad for them because he could not understand loving a home that could also mean your death.

Yixing had told him of the abandoned cities of the west, of nature taking back what had been stolen, of tall towers with steel cores crumbling under the pressure of thick vines clinging to their walls. He had walked through these ghost cities, collecting metal scraps and stories to tell in exchange for a hot meal. Someone still lived there among the rubble, he had told Baekhyun, but Yixing had never seen anyone, and luckily so. Those people came out only at night when the sun couldn’t burn their weak eyes out of their sockets. They dwelled in the nooks and crannies of their fallen cities, like rats, and, like rats, they were dirty and mean, and didn’t dislike the taste of human flesh.

Baekhyun had soon been enamored; he had never met in his life someone like Yixing.

Baekhyun had known Yixing would soon leave him – leave him _behind_ -, and, for that reason, he had wished that no one else was around, that Yixing’s eyes would fell on him and him alone, but it wasn’t easy to remain alone when inside the camp. He had wanted to keep him for himself, for as long as he could, for as long as Yixing’s wanderlust would allow him too.

Baekhyun hadn’t thought it possible, but Yixing had seemed to share the same wish.

He had planted his small tent a little further away from the limit of Baekhyun’s camp, while his beasts that looked like camels - Yixing had obstinately told him that _no_ , they were not camels, but _dromedaries_ , whatever that word meant - nibbled on the green grass surrounded by sheep and goats.

His goods had been prettily arranged at the entrance of his tent, and business had been going well, from what Baekhyun had been able to see: the merchandise had quickly been depleted, while the smiles on his people’s faces had increased. Yixing had a way with people.

Baekhyun thought it was thanks to his smile and his pretty dimple.

On the last day of Yixing’s stay, he had invited Baekhyun back in his tent, a bottle of _kumis_ – an alcoholic beverage made from fermented mare’s milk – in one hand, ready to be shared. Baekhyun had given it to him as a farewell gift, but Yixing had been adamant: alcohol needed to be shared to be enjoyed to its full potential. And so, they drank.

They toasted to their friendship, to the beauty of the plains Baekhyun called home, to the Mother, may She always watch over them, to Yixing’s safe journey.

The light of the small fire Yixing had lighted up in his tent gave his face a warm tint and his eyes a sweet shine. He looked so beautiful, Baekhyun had thought, as beautiful as winter dawn over snowy mountains.

Baekhyun didn’t know what had pushed him to do what he did that night, maybe the alcohol, maybe the sheer desperation of a man who had nothing to lose, maybe just loneliness, but he would forever be grateful for the small spark of courage that had traversed his heart and had pushed him to close the small distance that separated them to kiss Yixing square on the mouth.

It had been awkward at first, Baekhyun too drunk and inexperienced, Yixing too taken aback, and they had separated quickly, startled by the sound of Yixing’s cup falling from his lax fingers.

Baekhyun’s hands had trembled, stuck in mid-air: he had reached out for Yixing in the heat of the moment, to do what himself hadn’t known.

“Baekhyun…” Yixing had whispered, his lips so close to Baekhyun’s own he could feel the warm breath of air upon his face.

Baekhyun’s eyes had fallen back on Yixing’s lips and just like that, they were kissing again. And while soft and shy at first, soon enough Yixing had taken control of their kiss and Baekhyun had shuddered in his arms, for he had never felt so warm before, so drunk on life.

That night Yixing had laid him back on the threadbare rug of his tent and taught him how to make love.

When, the next morning, they had had to say their goodbyes, Yixing hadn’t asked him to come with him, for he knew he would have said no, and Baekhyun hadn’t asked Yixing to stay, for he knew you cannot cage a bird and expect it to be happy.

They had known that what they had would be but a brief slice of time, a blink of an eye in the course of their existence, and still, they had fallen to the sweetness of that moment.

They had said goodbye with one last kiss, knowing their shared time had come to an end: it was very unlikely for them to see each other again if fate did not allow. So they had kissed and then let go, Baekhyun’s eyes following Yixing’s little convoy until he had lost him behind a hill.

He would always be grateful to Yixing and remember him fondly. They hadn’t met again in the two years since their first meeting, but Baekhyun still stubbornly scrutinized the faces of every merchant that came to them in the vain hope of seeing a dimple peeking out from their cheek.

The days were cooler here. The preys plenty. There were rabbits hidden inside burrows, and grass snakes warming themselves upon rocks. Balam surveyed his new realm from above, letting himself be lulled by the winds blowing from the south. His sharp eyes noted every movement in the sea of grass below, by he wasn’t interested in that: his hunger had been satisfied and the mountains he could see before him were luring him with their call.

Balam flew up and then down again, the winds almost pushing him towards the mountainous range. He acquiesced to their call.

There was a valley between two peaks, barren despite the stream running through it.

The call was stronger there.

Balam landed upon a cliff and he took with curious eyes the sight of a hole protected by brambles in the steep side of the mountain from which the call seemed to be originating.

He couldn’t resist it and took flight.

When he neared them, the brambles parted at his proximity, and he flew inside, down, down a dark tunnel, but there was light at the end, and air so sweet and so clean unlike anything Balam had ever breathed before.

The cave opened on an oasis.

With a fluttering of wings, Balam landed on the arm of the being whose call he had been hearing, and he felt at peace.


	2. Chapter 2

In the next few days, Baekhyun’s clan settled well in the new place.

The shepherds went out every day to guide their livestock on the plains that surrounded the camp, the grass green and tender.

The rest of the men had already started to cut down some of the grass that, once dried, would be turned into hay. The work had come early this season; Baekhyun had agreed on letting them start this bothersome task earlier than usual in fear of not finding enough grass once back in the place they usually stayed in during the winter months. It would be a hassle to transport the bales of hay all the way down south, but Baekhyun hadn’t seen any other possible solution to their predicament. Kiyoung, one of the youngest members of their clan, a boy who had just met adulthood, had suggested they stayed in the new camp to pass the winter, but he was met with loud disagreement: the winter winds were stronger up north, and they didn’t know the area well enough to be completely sure of their survival with such adverse weather conditions. It was better to work harder now, while the sun was still warming their skin, rather than risking their lives out of sheer laziness. And so they all agreed with Baekhyun’s decision.

Life went on.

And Baekhyun was bored.

He kept doing what he usually did every day: morning lessons with the children, a walk around the camp to check on how everyone was doing, a few hours spent taking care of the animals back from their pasture, and then it was time to have their evening meal all together around a bonfire. It was the best part of the day, really: a time to share stories, to laugh, to dance among friends. Despite that, Baekhyun felt so bored and restless he could barely sit still.

His walks in the mornings became longer and longer, Balam often accompanying him from above, his presence a comfort but also the reminder of what Baekhyun could never have: complete freedom.

His mother had always told him that boredom was the sign of things going well; if he could get bored from doing the same work every day, then he could pat himself on the back because it meant that things were running as they should. The lack of boredom was dangerous in a life like theirs: it meant that something had gone wrong in their routine, it meant that their lives could possibly be in danger. Boredom was safety and Baekhyun should have felt grateful.

He should have, but he couldn’t.

He had often gone through periods such as this when everything he did wasn’t enough to calm his wandering spirit. They passed, sooner or later; he had learned how to overcome them, but sometimes he felt as if he lost more and more of his heart in exchange for peace.

It was when the weather turned hotter – as hot as it would on the plains -, that something changed. A little occurrence, a small nothing, something that, usually, wouldn’t even have registered in Baekhyun’s mind.

A goat got lost, and Baekhyun volunteered to bring it back home.

He took it as an excuse as good as any to go a little bit farther away from the camp than usual, and, judging from Jongdae’s knowing smirk in response to Baekhyun’s spontaneous bout of goodwill, his friend knew it too, but let him go anyway.

The young shepherd who had initially been chosen to carry out this mission had been delighted at the news. No one liked to search for a wandering goat when they could rather rest in the shadows of their tent while drinking a nice cup of kumis.

Baekhyun took off a little before midday; he carried with him a satchel with some sweet berries and a piece of hard cheese, his goat-skin flask thumping against his thigh at every step. Mongryong, their smallest shepherd dog, was scampering at his feet, his short legs working at full speed to keep up with his owner.

Baekhyun led them back to the pasture from where the goat had meandered off, and from there Mongryong seemed to instinctively know what to do: nose on the ground, fluffy butt sticking up in the air, he started snuffling among the pebbles and grass and, before long, he seemed to have picked up a trace. With a loud, joyous bark, Mongryong briefly fixed his liquid brown eyes on Baekhyun and then shoot off across the plain, Baekhyun yelling after him to slow down and wait for him.

 _I should have brought a bigger dog_ , Baekhyun thought briefly, already despairing at the thought of losing little Mongryong among the tall stalks of grass. He ran after him, jumping over ditches and rivulets of murky water, scaring a flock of birds into taking flight.

He was panting, drops of sweat running down his forehead and into his eyes, almost blinding him, while his heart beat so fast he thought it would drop out of his chest. And yet, a laugh broke free from the cage of his mouth, loud and unbridled. He kept laughing while running after his unruly dog, loving the feeling of the wind ruffling his hair, of his feet hitting the ground with force, of his legs aching from the strain.

 _This is what wild animals feel_ , he thought. Just then, a loud screech from above alerted him of Balam’s presence.

“Balam!” he cried. “Balam, look at me! Look how fast I’m running!”

His hawk kept spinning above Baekhyun’s head, following him closely.

Despite the strain, despite the wind whipping his face, Baekhyun had never felt such elation before: it was as if a weight that he had been carrying in his heart had suddenly been lifted, and he could run faster now, as agile as a hare.

He didn’t know what would happen to his mood once back at the camp, and he didn’t want to think about it, not yet. For the moment being, there, in that pasture, he felt free, and he didn’t ask for anything else.

Mongryong stopped at the entrance of a valley.

Looking around him, Baekhyun asked himself why their stupid goat had decided to wander from its green pasture to such a barren place, devoid of life apart for a few brambly bushes and the occasional lizard or two slithering upon the sun-drenched rocks.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” he asked out loud, scratching his chin. He took a closer look around the place, hoping to spot the black and white of their goat’s coat hiding behind a rock. But, alas, no such luck.

He sighed loudly.

“Mongryong, I think you might be wrong on this, I don’t--” Just as he was pronouncing those words, he had to go back on them for he spotted on the ground the unmistakable traces of goat hooves, stark against the dusty terrain.

“Stupid beast,” he muttered. The traces stopped right at the bottom of a steep wall of rock, the kind of which would be almost unreachable if not for some conveniently placed nooks and crannies that made for barely sufficient handholds. Granted, barely sufficient for _human_ hands and feet. But for a goat? It was a child’s play to climb up there.

“Why did it even climb up there?” he muttered. The wall was bare and he couldn’t understand what had pushed the goat there in the first place. Still, a goat was a goat, and he couldn’t go back to camp without at least trying to get it back.

“Mongryong, you wait here.”

The little dog had sat down at his feet, his tongue lolling out of his mouth. At the sound of his owner’s voice, his ears perked up and he moved as if getting up to follow Baekhyun, but a light tap on his butt stopped him in his movements.

“Stay,” Baekhyun repeated and, with one last look in the dog’s direction, he turned to face the wall.

 _Well, then_ , he thought, _let’s do this._ Cracking his knuckles, he started climbing, his long fingers grabbing the rock with force, his sheepskin-clad feet grappling with the lack of traction.

He might have not thought this through carefully, because, after five minutes of struggling to get himself up the wall, he had barely climbed up a meter or so off the ground. Sighing in frustration, he momentarily let go with one hand to try and get his canteen from where it was dangling at his side, but the move had been too careless and he fell ruinously to the ground, raising a cloud of dust around himself and Mongryong, who let out a small, cute sneeze, before licking Baekhyun’s cheek as if to comfort him after such a shameful ordeal.

Grumbling, Baekhyun got back to his feet and studied the wall of rock with a scowl on his face. He tried to visualize the best way to get all the way up on the top, but the sun had reached its highest peak, and there were no shadows on the wall that could help him figure out where all the handholds were.

Just as he was about to give up on the entire thing and get back to camp goat-less and with bashed honor, Balam glided down from his resting spot and hovered in front of him, before quickly moving up the wall, right beside the first handhold Baekhyun had noticed not so long ago. From there, the hawk moved up and down the wall, then sideways, in a sort of chaotic dance Baekhyun didn’t know how to interpret at first. Then, just as Balam looked about ready to give up on him, he understood: his hawk was tracing him the way to the top!

“Balam, you are amazing!” he told him and without further ado, he followed the bird’s directions with newfound energy.

Just as he was about to reach the top of the steep cliff, Balam screeched right in his ears, almost making him lose his grip from the shock. He yelped and barely managed to flatten himself against the wall, his left cheek bearing the brunt of his sudden movement. Panting, he glared at Balam, wondering if this had all been a ruse concocted by his own pet to kill him in the most roundabout way known to man.

“Balam,” he wheezed, “what the actual _fuck_?”

Balam just looked at him as if he was the stupidest being that ever graced the Earth. With a flap of his wings, he perched on the edge of a recess Baekhyun had been too preoccupied not to fall to his death to notice.

His irritation slightly abated, Baekhyun heaved himself up over the edge, falling face-first on the dusty ground as soon as his legs were no longer dangling over the abyss.

He rested like that for a while, catching his breath, before finally rolling over to face the sky.

“Never again,” he muttered, before heavily getting to his feet. Blinking away the dust that had collected in his eyes, he took in what he found in front of him: a not-too-large opening on the side of the mountain, barely visible behind a cover of tangled bushes sporting wickedly sharp thorns.

Baekhyun didn’t understand why Balam had led him there.

Frowning, he took a look around, thinking he might be overlooking something. But the edge was not very large, it could barely feet three persons if they stood tightly together, and the only thing of relevance his eyes could see was the breach in the wall, but surely the goat couldn’t have gone through it, now could it?

Just as he was about to lose any semblance of patience he still had left, Balam came, once again, to his rescue: flapping down, it came to rest on Baekhyun’s shoulder, mindful not to hold on too tightly. Confused, Baekhyun wondered why his hawk was behaving so strangely and if he really had come all this way just to go back empty-handed, when a rustling sound drew his attention away from his companion.

The branches that had been covering the entrance until a few seconds ago were now slithering away from it like long, brown snakes under Baekhyun’s astonished eyes. He blinked slowly and carefully stepped forward. He tapped the closest branch with the tip of his finger, but nothing happened and everything was still as if those same branches had not been moving just a few seconds ago.

Utterly lost, Baekhyun had no idea of what he had stumbled upon. For the first time in his life, he was at loss for words.

 _Branches do not move on their own_ , he thought hysterically. _Am I dreaming? Did I hit my head back then and now I’m lying face down on the ground, Mongryong running circles around my body?_

As much as he tried to think about the event in a rational way, he couldn’t wrap his head around it. So, he did what he would usually do when he found himself at a crossroad: do what Jongdae would do.

Without further debate, he stepped forward and disappeared beyond the entrance.

_Maybe I should have thought this through_ , Baekhyun considered after just a few steps inside what had been revealed to be a long, damp tunnel turning slightly downward towards the belly of the mountain. _Towards the belly of the beast_ , he couldn’t help thinking. He shivered.

It was dark inside, the dim light of the entrance becoming weaker and weaker at every step. The terrain was uneven, with loose rocks and detritus everywhere. Balam was flying ahead of him: sometimes he disappeared behind a bend causing Baekhyun’s heart to lurch in his chest. He would hate to lose his friend inside this place (truth to be told, he knew that Balam would find a way back to the surface; he wasn’t sure _he_ could).

“Balam, wait for me,” he half-whispered, half-yelled, quickening his pace. There was a faint sound coming from below him, like the rushing of water after the big rains, and it was getting stronger the more he walked. _A river flowing underground_ , he realized.

Now the tunnel was almost completely dark, and Baekhyun was quickly realizing that getting down there had been a huge mistake. How was he supposed to find a goat in this place? He felt as if he had been walking for days. In reality, it was no more than five minutes.

He had almost given up, ready to turn tails and go back to the surface, when Balam’s loud call startled him into keeping moving forward.

A few more steps were what it took for him to realize that the cave was no longer as dark as it had been and that the light came from before him. He stopped, confused, disoriented, unsure. And then, Yixing’s sweet face came to his mind, unbidden, and with it the stories he used to tell him around the bonfire, so long time ago.

 _I want to be brave_. _For once in my life, I want to be brave and be the protagonist of my own stories._

He took a deep breath and stepped forward into the unknown.

\------------

When Baekhyun was no more than six, he broke his leg.

It was summer; the driest summer they had seen in years. His clan had to move around a lot during those months, the water so scarce and the food barely enough to feed them and their animals.

One day, they had ventured so far they could no longer recognize what stood around them, but they stayed. And they survived.

Baekhyun and his friends spent their free time exploring the camp’s surroundings, venturing farther and farther away, but still keeping their parents’ tents in sight.

They found a tree, an old, gnarly thing, completely dry, barely standing. It was a strange sight that of a lonely tree surrounded by grass. It was the first tree the children had ever seen in their lives! Of course, it became their favorite playground.

They played all kinds of games in its shadow: they hunted for bugs under its bark, they pretended to be birds sitting on its branches. It was the best fun they had ever had. Until Baekhyun fell from its highest branch and broke his leg.

In the end, the poor, old tree succumbed at the end of a hatchet, its branches and its trunk turned into lumber. The adults couldn’t believe their luck. The children were in a foul mood for the rest of the summer months.

The trees that now stood in front of Baekhyun were nothing like the one in his childhood memories.

Tall, green giants, their crowns were barely visible in the semi-darkness. Gaping, Baekhyun took in the sight that had opened before his eyes, incredulous: in a cave in the belly of a mountain, Baekhyun saw proof of the existence of the Mother and was invaded by such awe his heart felt as if it was about to burst.

There were trees everywhere, grown so close together to create a thick forest, their foliage blocking the light that filtered from above. Raising his eyes, Baekhyun could scarcely glimpse an opening on the ceiling that appeared large enough to encompass the entirety of the camp back home.

Just then, a shadow moved quickly from one branch of a tree to the next. Yelling in fright, Baekhyun backed away until he stopped against a tree, trembling slightly.

The forest was alive, more alive than he had initially thought. Now that his eyes had gotten used to the darkness of the undergrowth, he could see movement everywhere: on the trees, among the branches, and between their roots; in the bushes and behind the rocks, among the grass… and right on Baekhyun’s foot.

Shouting, he jerked his foot so violently the poor creature that had inadvertently scared him to death went flying straight into a bush, hissing madly.

“What is going on,” Baekhyun stammered, following with his eyes the army of bugs that had taken flight after their home had been attacked by the snake Baekhyun had launched in the air.

“I don’t like this,” he whispered. “I really don’t like this.”

He stumbled a few steps away from the tree, hell-bent on going back home - goat and adventure be damned! -, when he felt something moving over his foot and up his leg in a scarily accurate repetition of what had happened a few moments before. Shaking in disgust, he realized too late that what was crawling up his leg was not, in fact, an innocuous little snake, but a brown vine, as thick as Baekhyun’s wrist, descending from the tree. Before he could let out as much as a scream, the plant seized him and upended him upside down, his head knocking loudly against the tree trunk. He was out in a few seconds.

When Baekhyun came to, he very much wished he had remained unconscious. Blinking slowly, even the dim light of the forest hurt his eyes, sending a sharp spike of pain into his brain. Wincing, he groaned out-loud, tightly closing his eyes against the assault of the light.

 _What a great adventurer I am_ , he scoffed, _to be knocked out by a_ plant _._

He kept mumbling to himself, taking in all the parts of his body that were hurting at the moment, and all the sounds in the forest that could alert him of something dangerous coming his way. It wasn’t like he would be able to do anything about it anyway. He was dangling from a tree in an unknown forest, he might as well have a sign on his back saying, “eat me.”

He had almost lost all sensitivity to his limbs and was _this_ close to starting to laugh hysterically, when he felt something poking his forehead with enough force to send him swinging back and forth.

His bag, which had been hanging on his body by a small act of sheer stubbornness, fell ruinously to the ground, spreading its content all over the small glade.

Frozen in fright and about to throw up, Baekhyun – very slowly – blinked his eyes open, fearing what he would find in front of him: an enormous beast with sharp tusks ready to chew him up? A snake ready to squeeze him in its coils and gobble him whole? A… a boy, dressed in white, crouched before him, his finger stretched to poke him again.

They observed each other for a few seconds, one in disbelief, the other in barely veiled curiosity.

The boy poked Baekhyun again.

“Ya!” Baekhyun exclaimed in outrage. “What do you think you’re doing? Let me down!” He seemed to have recovered all his courage now that he knew that the unknown foe was, in fact, just a boy his age, and started wiggling madly, like a worm trapped in a cobweb, fueled by rage and indignation.

Unimpressed by his outburst, the boy stood up and, ignoring the insults Baekhyun was spitting out, picked up a few of the objects that had fallen out of Baekhyun’s bag, including a small knife, some twine, and a piece of cheese wrapped in coarse cloth. Curious, the boy sniffed it and tasted it with the tip of his tongue. He let out a soft, astonished “oh” before munching happily on it, snickering at Baekhyun’s bewildered face.

“You—you! Let me down, I said! Hey, can you hear me?! Let! Me! Down!”

Rolling his eyes, the boy snapped his fingers and Baekhyun fell violently to the ground, cursing and spitting like an angry cat, before quickly rolling over and stumbling to his feet. Or, at least, he tried: his legs were so weak and shaky he fell right back down on his butt. At the sound of laughter coming from the other boy, who was now analyzing with great interest what turned out to be Baekhyun’s precious flint, his blood boiled so much he thought he was about to pass out, as if he hadn’t had enough humiliations in one day to last him a lifetime.

“How dare you touch my things like that! Stop it! Hey!”

He quickly realized that yelling was doing him no good; the other boy kept ignoring him and touching all his stuff as if he had never seen before something as basic as a knife.

“You sure are something, aren’t you…” Baekhyun huffed and resigned himself to being ignored for the time being.

Resting against the tree that had previously trapped him, Baekhyun took the time to observe the newcomer, too curious, maybe, for his own good.

The first thing he noticed was that the boy was tall, taller than Baekhyun, with long, graceful limbs barely hidden by the translucent clothing he was wearing. He was barefoot, but not a speck of dirt soiled his feet or the hem of his dress. He seemed to be gliding among the flowers and the grass, his long, dark hair rippled by a gentle breeze. He was beautiful, and the more Baekhyun took him in, the less he was able to look away. He shone as if imbued with a gentle light.

Suddenly, the boy’s eyes were fixed on Baekhyun’s; Baekhyun gasped, startled by the intensity he saw reflected in them.

“You are human,” the boy said.

“What—what else am I supposed to be?”

The boy ignored his words once again. “Humans are not allowed in here,” he frowned.

He had a deep, soft voice, like butter on warm bread.

Gaping, Baekhyun was at loss for words.

“How did you get in?” The boy asked that question out-loud, but he wasn’t actually expecting an answer from Baekhyun. He stepped closer to the trunk of a massive tree and gently placed his hand on it, closing his eyes. “Oh,” he gasped soon after and turned to look at Baekhyun with newfound gentleness in his eyes.

“A hawk thinks of you as his own.” He smiled.

 _He has a pretty smile_ , Baekhyun thought.

“The trees will let you stay.” He offered him his hand and Baekhyun grasped it mindlessly. It was warm and bigger than his own.

“Welcome, Baekhyun.”

“I’ve never met a human before, you know?”

Baekhyun winced, startled. He had been so preoccupied gazing in a stupor at his companion’s profile that the loud voice so close to his ears had frightened him.

The other boy was looking at him expectantly with a smile as big as his face that was quickly dimming in response to Baekhyun’s lack of reaction. Pouting, he mumbled, “You sure were eager to yell at me not long ago, now that I’m being nice you’re not interested in talking to me at all?”

The sight of that pouting mouth together with those big, dark eyes framed by long lashes that casted pretty shadows on his cheeks was absolutely devastating to Baekhyun’s poor heart and addled mind.

“I’m—I’m glad to be the first human you meet?” he stuttered, tentatively.

The beaming smile he received back was enough to send his heart into a mad dance inside his ribcage. He flushed, but he returned the smile with a small one of his own.

He wasn’t totally convinced this wasn’t some dream brought to him by a bad batch of cheese, to be quite honest.

“So, what are you doing here?”

The question took Baekhyun off-guard. What was he doing there? He was… “I’m looking for a lost goat,” he answered.

“A lost goat! We have a ton of goats here! Angora, Huaipi, Kamori, Maltese…” the boy listed. “What breed is yours?”

He was looking at Baekhyun with such unbridled enthusiasm Baekhyun didn’t know how to tell him he had absolutely no idea of what he was talking about. “It’s… white…” The boy nodded at him encouragingly. “And… black.”

“Oh.” The boy’s smile dimmed quite a bit. Baekhyun felt absolutely crestfallen.

“Then… what’s her name?”

“It… doesn’t have one…?”

The boy looked affronted for the goat’s sake. “I bet she’s not happy about that.” He shook his head, quite dejected.

Baekhyun couldn’t believe he was made to feel guilt over not giving one of their dozens of goats a proper name.

“Listen, it’s not like—”

“Well,” the boy interrupted. “I guess we can look for her, maybe I’ll ask the squirrels if they have seen anyone new. They are awfully attentive over this sort of thing…” And with that, he was off, not even waiting for Baekhyun to acknowledge his words. He was expecting to be followed, and following him Baekhyun did, feeling more confused than ever.

The place was huge, way bigger than Baekhyun had initially anticipated. With his initial stupor slowly ebbing the more he walked alongside his new acquaintance, the more Baekhyun started to come up with bizarre ways to explain to himself the situation he found himself in, but any explanation came short in front of the grandness his eyes were taking in.

The boy had led him on a path through the thick grove – a path he alone seemed to be aware of -; after a while of walking – and talking, on the boy’s part -, they popped out of the trees on a green meadow, dotted here and there by patches of wildflowers.

But what really left Baekhyun speechless was the sight of the animals: there were so many of them and of so many different sizes and kinds, Baekhyun didn’t know where to look. Big or tiny, hairy or with scales, they rested peacefully on the soft grass or played with each other just as the puppies back home were wont to do.

There were animals he had never seen before and others that he recognized thanks to the tales of the wandering merchants. And it was that familiarity that helped him shake off the dream-like state he had fallen into and run headfirst into a new adventure, as he had always dreamt to.

There was a lake in the middle of the meadow – probably replenished by the underground river Baekhyun had noticed before -, and it was towards that lake that Baekhyun started running like a man possessed, leaving his companion behind. He had glimpsed from afar the form of an animal he had always wished to see up-close, one that had starred in Yixing’s tales: with fur as red as the setting sun, it was easy to distinguish among the green, despite its not very large size.

When Baekhyun reached the bank of the lake, he stood some distance away from the animal, worried that he might scare it with his sudden approach. It was busy cleaning its fur, cutely licking its front paws and then rubbing its long, fluffy tail. Baekhyun’s thoughts ran to his children and how much they would coo over this adorable creature. Jongin, in particular, would go absolutely mad over it.

Meanwhile, the other boy had reached Baekhyun and stood with him, observing the animal waddle back into a grove of bamboo that grew by the banks of the lake, its tail lazily swishing back and forth.

“Red pandas are really cute,” the boy declared, a smug smile on his pretty lips.

“Red pandas,” Baekhyun mumbled back, to better remember the name. Just then, a herd of white-as-snow animals closely resembling his clan’s yaks approached the lake and drank from its waters, their verses as loud as thunder. Birds flew over their heads and settled on their horns, unfazed by their loud calls.

“How…”

The boy turned to look at Baekhyun with attentive eyes, and he looked ready to wait as long as Baekhyun needed to formulate his thoughts.

“How does a place like this exist? _What_ is this place?” Baekhyun asked with fervor. “Where are all these animals coming from? And, and—who are you?” He accusingly pointed his finger towards the boy’s chest, hoping to look more assertive than he felt. 

“I’m Chanyeol.”

“What?”

The boy chuckled. “My name is Chanyeol. As for your other questions, come back tomorrow and I’ll explain everything.”

“Tomorrow? Why tomorrow, why not now? And why are you so sure I even want to come back to this place?” Of course, Baekhyun _did_ want to come back, but admitting it to himself was different than admitting it to a stranger, as fascinating as that stranger may be.

“Because, while your mind may be confused, your heart has never beaten faster or more joyously than today. Come with me now, let’s look for your lost goat. You need to hurry back home if you want to be back before sunset.”

Swallowing the lump in his throat – how did someone he just met understand him more than his family and friends ever did? -, Baekhyun went.

They found Baekhyun’s goat – or, at least, what Baekhyun _assumed_ was his goat. Chanyeol seemed absolutely sure of it: “Of course it’s your goat, she was telling the others all about living among humans. Look at them, they are horrified, the poor things.” – in a patch of dandelions, gorging itself on the tasty flowers together with a bunch of its peers. Chanyeol sweet-talked it into following Baekhyun back home without making too much of a fuss and Baekhyun sincerely hoped Chanyeol didn’t promise it things his clan couldn’t possibly grant.

That task accomplished, Chanyeol led Baekhyun back to the entrance of the cave and made him promise to be back the next day, without fail. They found Balam waiting for them there, and Baekhyun perceived an air of smugness around him, nor did he miss the look of complicity shared between him and Chanyeol.

Just before leaving him, Chanyeol gifted him with a flower that would light the way through the cavern: “It won’t wither. Take it with you tomorrow and all the other days to come.” The flower had petals the color of a violet sky, with bright, golden accents. Its scent was light and comforting, it reminded Baekhyun of the springs of his childhood.

“Goodbye, then,” Chanyeol said, waving his hand. “See you tomorrow!”

“Goodbye,” Baekhyun answered somewhat tentatively and entered, once again, the tunnel that would lead him back home.


	3. Chapter 3

The road back home was peppered with disgruntled bleating – on the goat’s part – and disgruntled muttering, Baekhyun having to drag the goat all the way home (Chanyeol’s convincing act hadn’t sorted the desired effects).

Despite this, despite the strain his body was suffering after such a long day, despite Mongryong’s yapping and his attempts to trip Baekhyun while running circles around him, Baekhyun… Baekhyun felt happy. No, not _happy_ , maybe that was too strong of a word. He felt… he felt _something_ , something that wasn’t boredom, or despair, or the sincere love he held for his children.

Chanyeol had set fire to his heart and now it was a blazing forest.

Baekhyun had decided not to pose himself too many questions; questions he knew he couldn’t answer, not yet. Although he had appeared reticent at Chanyeol’s request to come back to his sanctuary the next day, Baekhyun knew that he would not disregard his invite, his curiosity too big, his fire too strong. He needed answers and he would find them only in Chanyeol’s words.

He hadn’t missed how, at his inquiry asking him who he was, Chanyeol had only answered with a name. Maybe Baekhyun should have asked him _what_ he was, instead. There was no doubt in his mind that Chanyeol could not be any ordinary man.

He reached the camp just before sunset. He slipped through the tents mostly unnoticed, people busy cooling down after the day’s work and preparing dinner inside their tents. He left the stubborn goat inside the paddock together with its siblings and then approached Junmyeon’s tent, knowing he would find his children there.

Junmyeon’s tent was recognizable by a wooden rack placed right by its entrance. The healer used it during the summer to dry whatever plants or animal parts were needed for his medical concoctions. Baekhyun spied some purple flowers that reminded him of the magical one Chanyeol had given him and that he was now carrying in his bag. True to Chanyeol’s words, the flowers had started glowing under Baekhyun’s skeptic eyes as soon as he had stepped inside the dark, damp tunnel, allowing him to reach the exit far more quickly than he had estimated.

The closer he got to the tent, the louder the laughter of his four children got, spilling out of the open flaps moving in the warm breeze. He could hear Jongin’s unmistakable laughter and Sehun’s screeches, Narae’s giggles, as sweet as summer berries, and Kyungsoo’s screams, of which he couldn’t quite discern the words, muffled as they were by the heavy canopy of the tent.

Spying between the open flaps, he saw Junmyeon in quite an unfavorable position, crawling on his hands and knees across the rug-covered ground while Jongin and Sehun were sitting astride his back, clearly having the time of their life. Kyungsoo and Narae were skipping around them, looking quite the bouncy rabbits, and Baekhyun couldn’t help but laugh out loud at his friend’s misfortune: he, too, had often found himself playing horse for his children, a game they seemed to never tire of.

 _Poor Junmyeon_ , Baekhyun thought, _your back will be killing you tomorrow_. 

“Oh, blessed be the Mother, you are finally here.”

Baekhyun’s laughter had attracted the attention of the tent’s occupants and he could swear no one had ever looked at him with such naked relief on their face as Junmyeon was doing then.

After much cajoling – and a big thank you to his friend for taking care of his children while he was away -, Baekhyun corralled the kids back in their tent and put them to bed, not without some struggle: Junmyeon had done an excellent job in hyping them up and they kept bouncing all over Baekhyun’s tent for a good while before he managed to wrestle them into bed.

The camp was quiet, the silence only interrupted by the bleating of some sheep and by the crackling of the fire pit. Baekhyun ate a modest dinner of cheese and a few bitter vegetables and then settled down in front of the makeshift altar he had, as always, assembled at the far end of the tent, facing the east.

He kneeled before it and offered the Mother fresh flowers and a cup of milk, placing them at the feet of the small statue of the Goddess. He found comfort in repeating the same gestures every night, sometimes alone, sometimes with the children, other times with the entire clan, during weddings or to celebrate the coming of spring. He preferred it when he was alone, for he could spend a longer while kneeling before Her altar; in that quiet solitude, he found peace. Fleeting, yes, but, at that moment, real.

That night, for the first time in a while, he greeted the Mother with a smile.

 _I have never doubted You_ , he prayed, _but today something impossible happened, something that made me surer than ever of Your strength. I often pray to You with my heart in turmoil, paralyzed by the fear of my shortcomings, but tonight I come to You with a lighter spirit. Please, accept these meager offerings. Grant me courage and wisdom to guide my people, the strength to realize my mistakes and to ask for help when needed._

In the flickering light of the fire, Baekhyun thought that the statue seemed to be smiling.

Getting away from camp for the second time in a row was not an easy feat. As the leader of his clan, people expected Baekhyun to put the communal life before anything else; he couldn’t skirt his duties, nor did he wish to. People might have been surprised, at first, when Baekhyun’s father had decided the title of clan’s leader would pass, at his death, to the youngest of his children, preferring the rowdy and carefree Baekhyun to the quiet and gentle Baekbeom, but Baekhyun possessed a charisma that his older brother had lacked and a willingness to attempt the impossible if it was for his clan’s wellbeing. Still, after so many years after their deaths, he couldn’t help but miss his family’s guidance, and his brother’s steadfast support more than anything else.

The next morning proceeded as any other mornings before that. He taught the children the way of their people, solved a few disputes and any other problem that came his way. It was past midday when he deemed it possible to leave the camp without his conscience making too much of a fuss about it. The only problem was, he needed to find a good enough excuse to disappear for a few hours for the second day in a row.

The night before he had tossed and turned in his bed, unsure whether or not going back to Chanyeol would be a smart idea. There was no hiding his curiosity, the pull he felt towards that incredible place and its inhabitants, but he knew that leaving the camp without a good enough reason would be seen as suspicious.

_What a fine leader you are, Baekhyun, worrying more about how to justify your escapades rather than about what could happen in your absence._

Guilt was gnawing him inside, for he knew that he had already decided to go. The only thing standing between him and relative freedom were his people, and what an awful thing to say that was. He convinced himself that it would be just this once, that he would not go back to that – wonderful – place and to that man ever again. He would satisfy his curiosity, ask Chanyeol all he wanted to know, and then leave, never to return.

His mind settled, he could finally find sleep when the sky was already lighting up with the first sun.

“Scraps?”

“Mh,” Baekhyun nodded, nonchalant. “I saw them yesterday while looking for our escapee. There might be something useful, so I thought I could go check it out today, while the memory of the place is still fresh.”

The excuse Baekhyun had come up with during his restless night was this: the day before, while searching the plains for their goat, he had seen, near the mountains, what appeared to be metal scraps emerging from the dry terrain. He would go back, check them out and bring back anything useful. Of course, that was what he told Jongdae; in reality, there were no metal scraps to be found. He would come back to the camp empty-handed, claiming that the metal he had glimpsed from afar was actually too rusty to be of any use.

It was the perfect plan.

“Shouldn’t you bring the cart with you, then?” Jongdae asked, and was Baekhyun imagining the tiny, knowing smile decorating his lips?

“Ah, no, no, I don’t think I’ll need it…” _Damn it, Jongdae_.

Jongdae stopped weaving the half-way done cord he had in his hands – a noble pastime, surely – and looked at him with a raised eyebrow, an unimpressed look he often regaled Baekhyun with since their childhood days.

“You might want to bring someone with you, then. I think Sangwon is done for the day, I’ll go ask him.” And he moved to get up.

“No!” Baekhyun yelled, and damn it, all he could do then was either to confess or to keep playing the part. Of course, he chose the second option. “No, there is no need, Jongdae, really, haha!” What a fool he had been, going to Jongdae to warn him of his absence. For one moment he wished his unofficial second in command weren’t as smart – or as terrifyingly beautiful.

Baekhyun got up and had already scuttled his way to the tent’s entrance, hoping to leave this discussion unscathed, when Jongdae’s voice, soft and kind – and why was he so _perfect_ – stopped him in his tracks.

“Baekhyun, you know you can tell me everything, right?”

Baekhyun didn’t dare turn around and look him in the eyes. He nodded, his throat tightening for some undiscernible reason – or, at least, that’s what he told himself -, and made his way out of the tent, hoping that Jongdae wouldn’t stop him again.

He missed the concerned look on his best friend’s face and the sigh that followed his hasty retreat.

“Baekhyun!”

A whirlwind of dark hair and light-colored robes tackled Baekhyun as soon as he came out of the tunnel. Wind knocked out of him, Baekhyun could only endure while Chanyeol squeezed the air out of his lungs.

“I’m so happy you’re back!”

“Well,” Baekhyun cleared his throat. “Yes, of course I’m back. I promised, didn’t I?”

Finally releasing Baekhyun from his hold, Chanyeol was positively beaming. “I have so many things I want to show you!” he told him, graciously ignoring the redness that had taken over Baekhyun’s cheeks.

“I’m—I’m glad!” And why was Baekhyun feeling so shy all of a sudden? That was unlike him. Was it the effect of having those brown eyes looking only at him as if nothing else in the world mattered at that moment? Baekhyun was getting ahead of himself.

Lightly slapping himself in the face – and earning a confused look from his new friend -, Baekhyun took a few steps away from Chanyeol, and in the most enthusiastic tone he could muster with his heart in turmoil, he told Chanyeol to lead the way. What he did not expect was for Chanyeol to grab him by the hand and drag him into the forest, babbling excitedly about everything that came to his mind.

Now that he was exploring it with Chanyeol, the forest looked far less eerie than it had the day before. Baekhyun didn’t know if it was just his imagination, but it seemed like the plants and the animals were much more welcoming; it felt as if Chanyeol was their sun, and they were opening up to him like blossoms in springtime.

“Where are we going?” Baekhyun asked him, stubbornly ignoring the hand that was still holding his own, telling himself that it would be rude to let go of it but that he was not enjoying the experience, not at all.

Chanyeol smiled at him, and Baekhyun thought that Chanyeol must have been born with a smile on his face to bestow it so carelessly on the world. Chanyeol radiated happiness and Baekhyun couldn’t help but wish to warm himself under his light, to let go of the sadness that accompanied him like clouds promising a storm.

“I’m taking you to my favorite place in the entire forest, of course. There are so many things that I want to show you that I didn’t know where to start, so I told myself to start with the one I want to show you the most! And that’s my favorite place.”

It was impossible not to smile at his enthusiasm. The more time Baekhyun spent with Chanyeol, the less he felt like he was talking to a stranger. He felt like some missing part of him had finally come back to him, and wasn’t that a scary thought? To be already so caught in someone you had known for less than a day. But that was Chanyeol’s effect on you, Baekhyun thought. Once caught, there was no escape.

“Here we are!” Chanyeol exclaimed while plopping down on the dewy grass and dragging Baekhyun down with him, who almost fell on his lap. He looked expectantly at Baekhyun, anticipating his reaction.

At first, Baekhyun didn’t understand what was so special about that place. They were sitting down in a small clearing, surrounded by trees, and the only thing Baekhyun could hear were the calls of the birds hiding between the branches.

And it was by looking at those branches, hoping to catch sight of some of those animals, that he realized: the trees were loaded with _fruits_. He quickly stood up and ran towards the tree nearest to them, Chanyeol’s laughter as joyful background music.

Mouth agape, Baekhyun took in the abundance nature was offering, an unexpected treat in his life devoid of earthly pleasures. Fruits were so rare in Baekhyun’s world, almost non-existent if not for the few berries summer gifted them from bushes that in winter had offered only thorns.

But that view, those trees with branches almost groaning under the weight of so many fruits, all different, shining under Baekhyun’s covetous eyes, that was…

“Do you like it?”

That was _everything_.

“These are my favorites, try them!”

Chanyeol was offering him small, yellow fruits, with slightly fuzzy skin, that smelt _divinely_. Baekhyun eagerly grabbed them and bit down into their heady flesh, quickly getting drunk on their sweetness.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten,” he said, juice running down his wrists.

“You’ve said that for each fruit you’ve tried!”

True. Baekhyun had been stuffing himself for a while, and he thought, a bit shamefully, that the impression he must be giving Chanyeol wasn’t one of the best.

Swallowing the last bite of the delicious fruit, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then licked his lips, chasing the taste of the heavenly morsel. Then, he suddenly remembered something. Refusing Chanyeol’s offer of more fruits – even he had a limit, as unlikely as that may seem -, he opened his bag and took out a piece of cheese wrapped in cloth.

“Here,” he offered. “I saw you liked it yesterday, so I thought of bringing you more.” He rubbed his nose, a bit embarrassed. Chanyeol accepted his gift with the loveliest of smiles.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Chanyeol told him, unwrapping the cheese. It was a different kind of cheese than the one he had eaten the day before, and he seemed to realize it not without some giddiness. “No human had ever breached this place before and, as its guardian, I had to do what was in my power to protect it.” He took a bite out of the cheese and hummed, satisfied.

“Guardian?”

Chanyeol nodded, swallowing the cheese before answering. “Yes. Is that something you are curious about? Ah, I should have expected it!” And before Baekhyun could confirm or deny his claim, he launched himself into a detailed explanation. “As you can see, this place offers refuge to any creature that needs it.” Suddenly, he frowned and Baekhyun discovered that he didn’t like seeing that expression on his face; he stifled the urge to smooth over the wrinkle that had appeared between Chanyeol’s brows.

“The best way I can define this place is with the word _sanctuary_. A place where nothing bad can happen to those who live in it, where it's always springtime and the water is sweet and safe to drink.”

While he was talking, a fawn had appeared from behind the trees. To Baekhyun’s amazement – but, maybe, he shouldn’t have been amazed at all – it slowly crossed the clearing and laid down beside Chanyeol, its head on his thigh. It was such a beautiful sight that Baekhyun forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.

His long fingers caressing the fawn’s head, Chanyeol resumed his talking: “Before the disaster,” and Baekhyun didn’t need to ask of what disaster he was talking about, “the trees here were few. Just me and my brother.”

“I’m sorry, you and your brother…”

“Ah, I should have started from there, I’m sorry, Baekhyun. Do you know how a nymph is born?”

_Before pain and starvation crossed the land, there were trees as old as time, strong and wise. They weren’t many, scattered on Earth as grains of rice spilled on the floor, but their importance was not to be underestimated for, from those trees, nymphs were born._

_For a twist of fate, two of these trees were born in the same place, just a few centuries apart. The oldest one, a white pine, stood at the entrance of a cave, tall and silent, but not for long. It took it only two thousand years to give birth to its nymph. And so, Minseok was born, the nymph of the white pine._

_The first few centuries of Minseok’s life were filled with happiness and longing. Nature around him was thriving, and there was nothing that he loved more than taking care of plants and animals, but he wished so badly for a companion, someone to talk and play with, someone who understood._

_His wish seemed to be granted when he stumbled across an old persimmon tree that, alone, was growing inside the cave Minseok’s tree was guarding the entrance of. The persimmon tree was old but still bore fruits, sweet and plentiful. What incredible feat to be born inside a cave with little light and little water, and still grow so strong against all adversities!_

_Minseok guarded the tree for a long, long time. He talked to it, took care of its needs, fed himself on its sweet fruits, until, finally, one day, Chanyeol came to be, the nymph of the persimmon tree._

_We are brothers, Minseok told him, I’ll take care of you. And Chanyeol accepted his love with grace and gratefulness, and loved him in return._

_They were happy. They looked after each other and all creatures around them, they played and talked and their happiness protected them from the ugliness of the world. But, one day, that ugliness came knocking at their door._

_They vowed to protect what was theirs. Inside the cavern, they planted new seeds and encouraged them to grow fast and strong, they corralled all the animals they could and promised them they would be safe. Their magic made a sanctuary out of that place, but it wasn’t enough. They needed to seal the cave._

_The amount of magic that required was terrible. Minseok knew, in his heart, that he would do whatever it was needed to keep his brother safe._

_He tricked Chanyeol. He was the nymph of the pine tree that stood at the entrance of the cave. He was the one who had always guarded its passage. He would continue to do so and his sacrifice wouldn’t be in vain as long as his brother was safe._

_He tricked Chanyeol, told him to wait for him in the cave, that he would return soon._

_He tricked Chanyeol and pierced his heart with a branch of his own tree, made as sharp as an eagle’s talon. The blood he spilled on the grass was the strongest magic at his disposal; he sealed the entrance and every creature within._

_When nymphs die, they leave nothing behind. Their trees rot, their bodies dissolve in the air like mist, never to be seen again._

“His magic, his sacrifice… this place is alive only thanks to him. The tunnel you came from, that is not the real entrance of this place. Even I have forgotten where it stands. I’ve dug that tunnel with my own hands, my own magic, knowing that, outside, there were many more creatures in need of a safe place. It is not often used, as difficult as it is to reach. Imagine my surprise when you tumbled out of there… you, a human!”

“Are… are humans not allowed here?”

Chanyeol looked at him, and Baekhyun’s heart shook in his chest. For one moment he was run through by immense dread, a coldness that seeped into him as if he had been submerged in freezing water. His breath stuttered in his chest and he had to divert his gaze, unable to look at Chanyeol in the eyes.

“Come,” Chanyeol told him, standing abruptly. The little fawn scampered away, startled. “There are many more things I want to show you.”

Baekhyun’s trip back home was uneventful. With his bag full of fruits he was carrying back for his children, if one had to judge by the expression on his face, one would say that nothing had unsettled him, that his mind was clear of trouble. And yet, Baekhyun had since long learned how to mask his feelings and had become even better at is since his children had come to live with him. So nothing showed the turmoil upsetting his heart and the jumble of thoughts occupying his mind.

Chanyeol was a nymph.

Baekhyun hadn’t been able to ask more after that revelation, after the way Chanyeol had looked at him as if he was seeing him – seeing him and all his faults – for the first time. He had followed him around the sanctuary, heart heavy and not knowing why, wishing for a smile to be directed his way. But Chanyeol remained unsmiling, his words stilted, his eyes lost in memories.

Baekhyun left. He would go back, he knew he would; that smile had made him weak. He needed to feel its light on his skin once again.

He wondered if Chanyeol had enchanted him somehow, had trapped him in his net, had wrapped a noose around his neck and now was tightening it bit by bit, Baekhyun pliant, unresisting. In the old stories, nymphs were told to be beautiful but dangerous beings, venomous flowers for absent-minded wayfarers. They held in them all the beauty and grace nature could offer, and all its dangers. Was Baekhyun being too trusting? He should stop going there, the rational part of his mind was telling him, but his body, his heart, his eyes that had taken in such beauty, had already made a decision.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” Chanyeol had asked him, just before leaving him at the tunnel.

“I’m not,” Baekhyun had answered him with little hesitation, and he had not lied. If Chanyeol would be his downfall, then so be it. He needed flowers in his life, and Chanyeol appeared to be the sweetest one of all.

Two days later, Baekhyun was back in the cave. He had left camp just after his morning lessons with the children, way before Jongdae and the other shepherds would be back. He knew the path they had taken on the plains and how to avoid them. Hopefully, Jongdae wouldn’t notice his absence at his return.

If Chanyeol was surprised to see him back so soon he didn’t show it: he was delighted, happiness flowing out of him; gone was the sullen Chanyeol of a few days before, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

Baekhyun didn’t dare break his happy mood and so didn’t ask any more questions about Chanyeol’s past; he was content with knowing more about any strange plant or animals they came across, feeling proud of himself anytime he managed to have Chanyeol’s smiles directed at him.

“Baekhyun,” Chanyeol said, somewhat shyly. They were walking along the banks of the lake, followed by a small procession of animals, eager to contend for Chanyeol’s attention. Baekhyun had been a bit wary at first, especially towards the big, scary cat – “That’s a snow leopard,” Chanyeol had told him, amused. “Don’t worry, she won’t hurt you. Well, unless you hurt her first.” –, but he was feeling calmer now, safe in Chanyeol’s company.

“Baekhyun, I have a lot of questions I want to ask you, too.”

Baekhyun stopped in his tracks, bewildered. Chanyeol had questions for _him_?

“You do?”

“Mh. Would you be willing to tell me more about yourself?”

No one had ever asked Baekhyun that question. In a clan as small as theirs, knowing each other quite well was… obvious. Expected. It was a matter of trust, of knowing who was better suited for a job, who you could trust with a secret, who you could trust with your _life_. Everyone knew everyone, and yet. And yet Baekhyun had the feeling that what he knew of the people around him were just superficial matters, things anyone could gather just from brief interactions. Of course, there were a few exceptions – Jongdae and Junmyeon came to mind –, but even they didn’t know everything there was to know about him, down to his most shameful secret.

He found himself fretting over the idea of sharing himself with Chanyeol; he wasn’t interesting, he would define himself as boring, really. The highlight of his days were his children and, lately, Chanyeol himself. Yet, a small part of himself was fighting to be heard, to be shared. Gone was Baekhyun, the leader of his clan; gone was Baekhyun, the father of his children; gone was the best friend, the teacher, the believer. All that remained was Baekhyun and if Chanyeol was willing to accept him, Baekhyun would offer himself to him, wholeheartedly.

Days passed and Baekhyun’s visits to Chanyeol’s garden – as he had come to call it – became more and more frequent. People had started noticing his absence, but had thought nothing of it: it wasn’t uncommon for their leader to disappear for a few hours, seeking whatever it was he needed and couldn’t find at home.

Jongdae had asked him a few times where he went when he was missing from camp and his frowns had gotten deeper and deeper the more Baekhyun lied to him, coming up with some excuse or another to justify the time he spent away from home.

Baekhyun kept telling himself that, as long as he didn’t skirt his duties nor messed up his work, there was no reason to worry; he needed the escape, or he risked going mad with boredom and longing. Everything was fine, everything was under control.

Chanyeol’s laughter sounded like the little silver bells that adorned the manes of merchants’ horses, joyful and silvery; he carried himself with grace, but, sometimes, he gave Baekhyun the impression of a newborn fawn, unsteady on its thin legs, until it started running and jumping here and there, without a care in the world. But the thing he loved the most about Chanyeol were his eyes: big and so dark, they seemed to be able to read what was inside Baekhyun, leaving him feeling naked and defenseless. And still, there was so much love and care reflected in them: for his animals, for the trees, for nature and all its wonders. Baekhyun hoped he would see that same love directed at him, one day.

“Will you braid my hair?”

They were sitting together in a field full of flowers under the shadow of a cherry tree. Baekhyun had stopped wondering about how magic had made this place possible and had decided to just enjoy it freely, without asking too many questions – the truth was, Chanyeol had once tried to explain to him the magic at work in his garden, but Baekhyun had been so confused by it he hadn’t understood a thing. Chanyeol had loved teasing him for it, making him flush to the roots of his hair.

Chanyeol was offering him a few flowers, the sweetest smile on his youthful face, eyes crinkled in the shape of the crescent moon. Taking the flowers from his hands, Baekhyun started braiding them in Chanyeol’s hair, wondering just how old Chanyeol was. There was no real recollection in his people’s memory of how much time had passed since the disaster that had forced their Goddess to sleep, but it sure had to be a few centuries! Magic was truly a wonderful thing, for Chanyeol didn’t appear one day older than twenty-five.

Taking advantage of his skills acquired as the father of a little girl, Baekhyun weaved Chanyeol’s dark, shiny locks into a pretty braid, interspersed, here and there, by colorful flowers, their scent, mixed to the one that was uniquely _Chanyeol_ , downright intoxicating.

“This is perfect, Baekhyun, thank you,” Chanyeol told him, bringing the tail end of his braid over his shoulder. “It’s really beautiful!”

“You are, too.”

Ah, what had come over him, to make him blurt such things out just like that? Oh, he wanted to hide his head under the ground and never come out again.

At Chanyeol’s inquisitive gaze, with eyes that were twinkling knowingly, Baekhyun couldn’t help but repeat: “You… you are beautiful.”

And oh, if such a small word was enough to make Chanyeol beam like that, lightning up everything around him, Baekhyun would tell him he was beautiful every day of his life as long as he had breath in his lungs and blood running through his veins. “You really think so?” Chanyeol murmured, and when had he got so close? Baekhyun could feel the warm sweetness of his breath on his face and his hand lightly caressing his thigh, a butterfly touch that ignited a fire inside Baekhyun, the strength of which scared him.

Baekhyun couldn’t divert his eyes from Chanyeol’s, mesmerized by his gaze, frozen still. He nodded, clumsy but sincere, utterly besotted, for, truly, Chanyeol was the most beautiful being he had ever seen. He was beauty itself: the beauty of a calm pond and the stormiest sea, the beauty of gentle rain and an uncontrollable fire burning everything on its path. He was the beauty of nature in its multiple forms: never bad, or good, or fair.

Nature just was, and Chanyeol was one with it, beautiful and terrifying.

Chanyeol kissed him and Baekhyun was set aflame.

They kissed for what felt like hours, lying on the soft grass, Baekhyun pressed on the damp ground by Chanyeol’s weight, his legs open to cradle him between them. Their kisses were sometimes lazy, sometimes hungry, and Baekhyun didn’t think he could ever have enough of them, enough of him, now that he knew the taste of Chanyeol’s mouth, the shape of his teeth, the sound he had made when Baekhyun’s tongue touched his for the first time.

By then, Chanyeol’s braid was completely ruined, undone by the same hands that had weaved it with such sweet devotion. Chanyeol’s hair fell like a curtain around the two of them, as if to hide them from the world. Baekhyun felt high, high on Chanyeol’s scent, on his taste, on his sounds, and he knew, he _knew_ , Chanyeol was as far gone as he was, he could feel it in the way he was touching his hips, or grabbing his legs, encouraging Baekhyun to wrap them around his hips. And then he moved his hips, slotting their lips together, and grinded down; Baekhyun’s responding moan could be heard in the entire forest surrounding them, the trees as silent sentinels guarding them against unknown foes.

Nothing was the same after that. Baekhyun wasn’t the same, either. How could he be, when he knew the sweetness of Chanyeol’s lips on his own, when he had kissed every inch of his skin, when he had worshipped him on his knees, the sky and the trees as their only witnesses?

Chanyeol took and kept on taking everything Baekhyun had to offer, but Baekhyun didn’t feel empty because of it: truth to be told, he had never felt fuller. He had finally found someone he could be himself with, someone who knew him, in body and soul. And if some parts of Chanyeol were still a mystery to him, that was fine, too. As long as Chanyeol would have him, he didn’t mind unwrapping him little by little; Chanyeol was too precious to him, and some things couldn’t be rushed. He had all the patience in the world, he would make sure he had the time, too.

“I’ll talk to my clan. I’ll convince them to spend the winter here.”

Baekhyun was lying with his head on Chanyeol’s lap, the other lazily running his fingers through his hair, making shivers of delight run down Baekhyun’s scalp to his back.

Chanyeol smiled, looking down at him. He ran the tip of his finger along the plains of Baekhyun’s cheeks, over the dip of his lips, along the line of his jaw. “You would give anything to be with me, wouldn’t you, Baekhyun?”

And he didn’t wait for an answer, because he already knew what it would be. He stooped over Baekhyun and kissed him, biting hungrily at his lower lip, swallowing all his gasps and moans.

They ended up making love right there, Chanyeol riding Baekhyun maddeningly slow, ignoring his helpless pleas.

When Baekhyun went home that day, he carried with him the traces of their lovemaking, red scratches on his chest and hips. He wore them proudly and wished they would never heal.

The days were getting shorter, the weather a little bit colder, and autumn was near. Wrapped up in more layers than usual, Baekhyun greeted the sunrise with a smile and took off towards Chanyeol’s garden. His clan was just waking up, but Baekhyun passed undetected between the tents, his steps light and quick. There was the smell of burned wood in the air, the fires inside the tents now blazing all night long.

He walked and walked and was halfway to Chanyeol’s garden when he spied a flower among the grass, swaying under the breeze. It was of a soft, buttery yellow, five pretty petals around a dark gold center. It reminded him of Chanyeol.

Gently, as not to ruin it, he picked it up and put it safely in his bag.

He found Chanyeol laying on a field, fast asleep. Baekhyun sat down next to him, quietly, and took off his jacket, too hot under the ceaselessly warm sun of Chanyeol’s sanctuary.

He observed a few animals coming and going as they pleased, not at all afraid or concerned about his presence. Stretching his arms up over his head, he settled down on the grass with a satisfied sigh, turning his head to look over at Chanyeol, still asleep. His lips were slightly parted and a delightful blush was spread over his cheeks and on the bridge of his nose; Baekhyun couldn’t help himself and placed a few pecks on his lovely face, following the pattern of his freckles. And when he heard Chanyeol sighing deeply, on the verge of waking up, he placed one last butterfly kiss on his lips, sweet as cherries.

“Hey,” he whispered, enchanted by the spectacle that was Chanyeol waking up from a deep sleep.

Chanyeol blinked, eyes hazy and confused, before they focused on Baekhyun. Mumbling something Baekhyun didn’t understand, Chanyeol stretched his arms towards him and dragged him closer, resting his forehead on his shoulder. Chuckling, Baekhyun pushed his nose into Chanyeol’s hair and inhaled deeply. Warmed under the gentle sunlight, they stayed like that for a while, basking in each other’s presence.

“I brought you something,” Baekhyun whispered, bringing a lock of Chanyeol’s hair behind his ear. “Don’t you want to see it?”

Those words awakened Chanyeol’s curiosity, as Baekhyun had hoped. Resurfacing from Baekhyun’s shoulder, he sat up and nodded enthusiastically. He was quite a comical sight, with his hair all ruffled and his dress slightly askew, his left collarbone peeking out from the lopsided collar.

Swallowing heavily – Chanyeol exuded sensuality without even trying –, Baekhyun reached into his bag and pulled out the flower he had picked earlier, fortunately still in good condition. A bit embarrassed, he offered it to Chanyeol’s awaiting hands, who took it gingerly, quite confused.

“Ah, I know, I know,” Baekhyun blabbered, unable to look Chanyeol’s in the eyes. “I know what you’re thinking. I know it’s stupid to give a flower to someone who can make flowers appear out of thin air, but… it reminded me of you and I couldn’t help myself,” he tapered off.

“Baekhyun, look at me.”

Since the first day, Baekhyun had never been able to refuse anything Chanyeol asked of him, so, despite the shame he was feeling, despite the telltale prickling at the corner of his eyes, he raised his head and his heart toppled in his chest.

It was the affection in Chanyeol’s eyes that made Baekhyun’s heart miss a beat; it was the blush on Chanyeol’s sweet face, the shy smile on his lips.

“I love it, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol said, and brought the flower behind his ear, tucking it safely among the curtain of his dark hair.

Unable to speak a word because of the lump in his throat, Baekhyun took Chanyeol’s hand in his own and brought it to his lips, kissing his fingers. _I love you_ , he thought, _I really do_.

Chanyeol enchanted the flower Baekhyun gave him so that it would never wither. He wore it in his hair, a splash of yellow against a dark sky. Baekhyun couldn’t help but smile with pride anytime his eyes fell on it – and, truth be told, it was quite often.

Chanyeol had become even more affectionate with him, often seeking his touch, and Baekhyun… Baekhyun had never felt happier. The time he spent cradled in Chanyeol’s arms was something he thought he would never have. He had thought that love and affection and intimacy didn’t exist for people like him, if not for some short-lived moments.

Chanyeol had destroyed all the preconceptions he held about love.

They were laying together, their bodies entwined, cooling down after making love, when Baekhyun, half-asleep, gave voice to his deepest wish. “I don’t want to leave you,” he murmured, his lips brushing against Chanyeol’s neck at every word.

Chanyeol held him tighter against his chest. “You don’t have to. You can stay here with me, forever.”

Baekhyun smiled, and fell into a deep slumber.


	4. Chapter 4

“Balam has been a bit fidgety today, don’t you think?”

Chanyeol gave Baekhyun a sideways glance and kept throwing stones across the lake, trying to make them bounce off its surface. It was a trick Baekhyun had taught him but that he had yet to master. Tongue sticking out from one angle of his mouth, he observed with a critical eye the stone skip across the water a couple of times before sinking unceremoniously at the bottom of the lake.

Frustrated, Chanyeol tossed the last stone with all the strength he had: it flew in a large arch above the lake before plopping into the water right beside a flock of ducks. Their indignant squawking brought a blush to Chanyeol’s cheeks; he apologized profusely to them before, finally, turning to Baekhyun.

“You think so? I haven’t noticed.”

He sidled up to Baekhyun, believing himself as stealthy as a panther. Baekhyun smirked knowingly but kept acting as nothing was happening, preparing himself to toss the stone that would proclaim the winner among the two of them. Baekhyun was leading the race with a record of seven skips with one stone, Chanyeol following with a quite shameful number of three.

Baekhyun had found out that Chanyeol had a terribly competitive side and enjoyed teasing him for it a bit too much, but, to his defense, he had a weakness for the adorable pout Chanyeol sported every time Baekhyun bested him in something - pout that he couldn’t help but kiss until it turned into a coy smile.

Just as Baekhyun was about to release the stone, Chanyeol jumped on his back with a warlike yell, sending both of them tumbling down the banks of the lake; they barely managed to roll to a stop before they ended up inside it. Laughing breathlessly, Baekhyun circled his arms around Chanyeol’s waist and prevented him from getting up, keeping him close to his body, deaf to his weak protests.

“You really are a sore loser, aren’t you?” Baekhyun told him, enjoying Chanyeol’s miffed expression.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Chanyeol sniffed, put out. Still, he had a mischievous light in his eyes, one Baekhyun had learned to interpret as _I like playing the offended party because I know you are gonna spoil me all that much for it_. It seemed to Baekhyun that the two of them had reached quite a satisfying agreement.

“Mmm, I’m sorry then,” Baekhyun whispered, his lips a hair’s width apart from Chanyeol’s.

Chanyeol smirked, and got closer still. Just as Baekhyun was about to feel those plushy lips on his own, Chanyeol jumped up and ran like a mad man towards the bamboo grove, cackling at the top of his lungs. “If you want kisses come to find me!” he shouted and disappeared among the plants.

Baekhyun chuckled to himself; his heart was so full of happiness and love he felt as if it could burst. There was no way a human heart was equipped to _feel_ so much and so intensely.

“Alright, then! I’m coming to get you!” he shouted and scrambled to follow the sound of Chanyeol’s giggles.

After their game of hide-and-seek – and after Chanyeol got Baekhyun right where he wanted him, namely on his knees -, they stopped for a while to rest and catch their breaths. Unsurprisingly, Chanyeol fell asleep. Baekhyun didn’t mind that much: it was a chance for him to relax a bit, napping together with Chanyeol, or explore the garden at his own pace. That day, he chose to take a walk around the lake, which was always a nice idea. All kinds of animals lived along its banks or inside its waters; Baekhyun was particularly enamored with a family of otters and was eager to see them again. Perhaps the parents would let him pet their babies even if Chanyeol wasn’t there with him.

He was already on the other side of the lake from where he had left Chanyeol when a sudden, frantic flapping of wings caught his attention; before he could raise his head to see what was going on, Balam landed hard on his shoulder, tightening his claws in a way he had never done before. Baekhyun thought he must have drawn blood.

Yelping, he tried to shake Balam off his shoulder, swearing left and right, but the hawk wouldn’t budge; rather, he became even more stubborn and, as if he hadn’t already caused enough trouble, he started yanking on Baekhyun’s hair with his beak, indifferent to his loud curses.

“Balam, what the fuck has gotten into you?! _Ow_ , you stupid bird, stop it!” Just as he was about to forcefully _yank_ his hawk from his shoulder, Balam took flight, his claws stained red with Baekhyun’s blood.

When Baekhyun thought that everything was over and was about to sigh in relief, Balam came back again, even more frantic than before. He started pulling Baekhyun by his clothes, his sharp beak easily puncturing the worn-out fabric. Despite Baekhyun’s struggle, there was no way for him to get rid of the bird; he had never seen him behaving like that. The uneasiness he had spied in him in the past hours had not prepared him for what was to come.

Defeated, Baekhyun started walking in the direction Balam was pulling him to and that seemed to appease the hawk. He let go of Baekhyun’s clothes and started flying ahead, checking every now and then that Baekhyun was still following him. Baekhyun couldn’t hide a certain amount of worry; what had Balam in such a frenzy? He decided to quicken his pace.

Soon, they arrived at the entrance of the tunnel that led into the cave; confused, Baekhyun looked around but nothing was amiss. He realized, then, that Balam had led him at the tunnel because he wanted Baekhyun to go back home. With a sinking feeling in his chest, Baekhyun gathered from the ground the bag and jacket he had left there earlier that morning – and why were they covered in dust and leaves? – and entered the passage to the outside world. He briefly thought about telling Chanyeol he was leaving, but Balam’s behavior had filled Baekhyun with unease and he wanted to hurry back home. Chanyeol would understand.

A blast of cold air greeted Baekhyun as soon as he came out of the tunnel and made him shiver. Had the weather changed so drastically in the matter of a few hours? There was some snow on the ground and the sky was covered in dark clouds.

Frowning, he hastened his pace, eager to reach the camp. The jacket he had put on wasn’t enough to protect him from the cold, nor were his shoes suited for walking in the snow. Soon enough, they got wet and his feet damp; the crunching sound of his steps on the snow was accompanied by the loud chattering of his teeth.

When he was in sight of the camp, Baekhyun sighed in relief.

Unfortunately, that feeling of relief wasn’t long-lasting; the closer he got to the camp, the more he realized that something was wrong. Too much silence, for one; people could very well be inside their tents, taking refuge from the cold weather, but why couldn’t he hear the bleating of their sheep, nor the bellows of their yaks? It was too late in the day for the shepherds to still be around with their beasts; everyone should have been at the camp.

His foreboding proved accurate, when, reached the outskirts of the camp, he found their paddock empty but for a few horses and goats; counted together, their number didn’t even reach ten. Swallowing heavily, he didn’t know how to explain to himself what his eyes were seeing. Where had all their animals gone? Where was everyone?

Frantic with worry, he broke into a run and soon enough reached Jongdae’s tent, one of the few with smoke still billowing out of its roof.

Yanking open its flaps, he cried, “Jongdae! Jongdae, what happened?”

Jongdae looked as if he had seen a ghost. His face was painted with uncertainty and disbelief; he seemed to be wondering if what he was seeing was real.

He had been busy packing something inside a chest, Baekhyun noticed. At Baekhyun’s arrival, he had been so startled that the object he had in his hands had fallen producing a soft _thud_ on the rug covered ground. It was a small statue of the Goddess.

“Jongdae, what—”

He didn’t finish his sentence; when uncertainty made room for sudden realization, Jongdae threw himself at Baekhyun with violence, eyes red from anger in an otherwise abnormally pale face. Grabbing Baekhyun by his lapel, Jongdae didn’t hesitate and punched him in the face. Blood sprayed in an arch from Baekhyun’s nose to the rug at their feet.

Stumbling backward and crying out in pain, Baekhyun brought a hand to his face, trying to staunch the blood. Tears had fallen from his eyes from the pain; his face hurt so much he could barely keep his eyes open, but Baekhyun knew he would never forget the rage that was deforming Jongdae’s face, nor the words he said to Baekhyun.

“How dare you come back like this,” Jongdae told him. He wasn’t screaming; it was as if he had consumed any energy he still had in his body by punching Baekhyun. He was slumping, breathing hard as if he had run for many miles. His clothes sagged on his body.

“How dare you come back here, pretending as nothing happened!” He launched himself back at Baekhyun, but there was so little strength left in him he would have fallen hard on the ground if not for Baekhyun, who grabbed him by the arms and accompanied his fall, kneeling with him.

“Jongdae, what are you saying, I don’t understand!” Baekhyun cried in anguish. He had never seen his best friend in such a state and couldn’t find an explanation for his behavior.

And then, Jongdae started crying. Ugly, fat tears were running down his cheeks, his chest shaken by sobs. “How could you leave us like that,” he whispered, so faintly Baekhyun thought he had imagined it. “They think you are dead, Baekhyun! I had to tell them you had died!” he wailed, grabbing Baekhyun’s shirt in his hands.

“Jongdae, Jongdae, I don’t understand! I’m—I’m here, why… why are you saying such things?”

By then, Baekhyun didn’t know what to think anymore. Jongdae’s words had come so unexpectedly, he felt more confused than ever. The painful throbbing of his nose didn’t help, either, or the headache that came along with it.

“A month, Baekhyun! You have been missing for a month!”

“What… Jongdae, what are you saying? What are you talking about? Stop messing around with me!”

“You think I would joke about this?” Jongdae wiped his tears with his sleeve and pushed Baekhyun away from him. “You think I would joke about having to tell your children their father would not come back?! Who do you take me for?!”

Baekhyun was shaking his head, incapable of processing what Jongdae was telling him. He had left camp that same morning, and had come back in the afternoon… hadn’t he?

“No, no, it’s impossible, I would know, _I would know_!”

There was a strange, manic light in Jongdae’s eyes; he got up, grabbed Baekhyun by the arm, and dragged him outside his tent, throwing him on the frozen ground. “Look around you,” he demanded. “Look! You asked me what happened! Look around you, can’t you tell what happened?!”

Baekhyun was kneeling lifelessly on the ground, his palms stinging from when he had tried to soften his fall. Swallowing heavily, he darted his eyes around the camp and it was with a sinking feeling in his chest that he realized things were direr than he had initially feared.

There was too much silence, too little movement. Where was everyone? He had initially thought people had taken shelter from the cold inside their tents, but they would have come out hearing them fighting, wouldn’t they? No sounds, no voices… with a shiver, Baekhyun recalled the story of a ghost city he had heard once, many years ago.

“Jongdae…” he sobbed. “Jongdae, where are my children?”

“They are safe. Junmyeon is taking care of them,” Jongdae sighed, frustrated, standing tall upon Baekhyun’s prostrate form. “Baekhyun, what did you do?”

“I don’t know,” Baekhyun cried. “I don’t understand!” His tears were mixing with the blood on his face. “I swear, Jongdae, I swear! I don’t—”

Like a bolt of lightning, words he thought he had heard in a dream came back to him in all their chilling truth.

_You can stay here with me, forever._

“Oh,” he cried in anguish. “Oh, my love, what did you do?”

“We searched for you everywhere.”

They were back inside Jongdae’s tent; Baekhyun had cried and uttered words that didn’t make sense, not to Jongdae, at least. Jongdae had helped him back inside, swallowing the hurtful words he wanted to spew to make Baekhyun suffer too, as much as he had made them – his family – suffer. But Jongdae swallowed back the bitter morsel and did what he had always done: he helped Baekhyun get back up to his feet and carried him in front of the firepit. He covered him with a woolen blanket that smelled of smoke and sat down in front of him, somber.

Baekhyun didn’t have the strength to look at him; he was shivering, but not from the cold. It was impossible to feel the cold in his state; better yet, the coldness in his heart was stronger than the one carried by the wind and the snow. He heard Jongdae talking, but didn’t have the strength to formulate any sentence. All he could think about were his children; all he could see in his mind was a sweet smile hiding the ugliest betrayal.

“Not even the dogs could pick up your scent. We didn’t know what to think.” Jongdae sighed deeply and he looked so, so tired. Defeated. “Where were you? What happened to you?”

Baekhyun blinked, his eyes fixed on the fire; where was he? In a dream, maybe. A fantasy. Something that he had thought real, but was not.

“Tell me—tell me what happened here, first.”

Baekhyun could feel Jongdae’s eyes scrutinizing him; what were they seeing, he wondered. A broken man, a shell of what he had once been? He felt as if he had aged fifty years in a couple of hours.

“When we didn’t see you come back after several hours we started to worry; we feared that something might have happened to you, but it was too dark to go looking, so we decided to wait the next day. We also hoped you might turn up in the middle of the night, that maybe you had just gotten sidetracked by something. When the light of the day came and there was no trace of you, a couple of guys and I took our dogs and started searching the plains. The animals were able to follow your scent at first, but, after a while, they grew completely disoriented: it was as if you had suddenly sprouted wings and taken flight. We went back home and tried again the next day and the next one after that. As you may suspect, we didn’t find anything.”

Jongdae didn’t tell him of the helplessness of those days, of the worry that had kept him up at night; he didn’t tell him of Junmyeon begging him to rest, at least for a few hours; of the children’s tears, of the children’s silence, more unbearable than never-ending crying.

Maybe Baekhyun could imagine it, though.

“And then,” Jongdae continued, “and then…”

And then, the sickness came. It hit the sheep first and then spread to all the other animals. They laid on the ground, weak, refusing food or drink, and it was nothing like people had seen before. They didn’t know how to cure it and the beasts started to die, one by one.

Panic arose.

The weather started turning colder and colder and what once could have been endured with little difficulty became, suddenly, unbearable.

With their leader dead and their only source of food almost completely depleted, what people had were the clothes on their back and, quite ironically, hay. Food that no one could eat.

They started rationing what they had, hoping, in the meanwhile, to come up with a plan on what to do next. Soon enough, factions split the clan in two: those who wanted to leave and go back south, hoping to find food of any kind, and those who, maybe foolishly, wanted to stay. Those who, after ten days from his disappearance, still believed that Baekhyun could be found. Jongdae had been among them.

People fought; some left.

Jongdae, Junmyeon, and a few others stayed behind and tried to organize their lives around new rules. Food was even more rationed; they started digging up edible roots; they took up hunting and fishing, with scarce results.

Of all the children that had been at the camp, only Baekhyun’s remained. Jongdae and Junmyeon did all they could to keep them fed, even giving up their food rations if necessary. The children cried, but never from hunger, not yet.

Twenty days from Baekhyun’s disappearance, people started to die. For older people it was easy to get sick in such cold weather and, weakened as they were by the lack of proper food, the fever took them away. Hearts heavy with sorrow, those who survived buried their loved ones in the field behind their camp, under a layer of frost.

“Tell me their names,” Baekhyun begged. “Tell me the names of everyone who died.” And each name was a nail in his heart.

“We are starting arrangements to leave, too,” Jongdae told him at the end of his tale. “We have given up.” _We have given up on you_ , Baekhyun added. But he couldn’t blame them; they had done for him more than he had ever done for them.

“I’m sorry, Jongdae. This is all my fault.” Baekhyun kneeled in front of him, forehead touching the ground. “I know--,” he said, throat tight and heart a heavy stone, “I know I have no right to ask for forgiveness. I couldn’t be who you needed me to be, I couldn’t help our clan when it needed it the most and,” he had to stop talking, choked by his tears. “And you have every right to be furious with me,” he cried.

“Baekhyun…”

The touch of a gentle hand on his hair was more than Baekhyun could take. The pain in his heart spilled over, filling up every recess in his body and coming out of his mouth as heavy, painful sobs, so strong he felt like they were tearing him apart from the inside.

And, when Jongdae gathered him in his arms and held him tight against his chest, Baekhyun couldn’t help but keep mumbling, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” between his tears, overcome by sorrow.

Jongdae held him for a long time until Baekhyun’s sobs slowly ebbed away. He kept caressing his hair and, Baekhyun thought, Jongdae was truly the kindest man on Earth to show such compassion towards the man who let them all down.

When Baekhyun found the strength to leave Jongdae’s arms, his friend didn’t let him go far. Taking his face between his hands, Jongdae dried his tears with his fingers – and what a mess Baekhyun’s face must have been, with its mix of blood, tears, and snot – and told him: “I know you, Baekhyun. I have known you since forever. I know what kind of man you are, I want to believe you didn’t leave us of your own volition or without a good enough reason. So, please, tell me what happened to you in this month we were apart. Tell me what happened before that, because I knew then that something had changed in you and I will always regret not forcing you to talk to me sooner.”

There was a hint of a smile on his face, but his eyes were the saddest Baekhyun had ever seen. He feared that the same sadness was reflected in his own.

“What happened,” Baekhyun said, “is that I fell in love.”

Baekhyun told him everything.

He saw Jongdae’s eyes get wider and wider, his hands gripping tighter and tighter the fabric of his pants. He saw him shake his head in disbelief, he saw him gulping back words he didn’t know how to say. Most of all, he saw him listening without judgment, not even when Baekhyun’s love was revealed to be male in form.

Once, Baekhyun had imagined revealing the truth about himself to his best friend in a much different way. Once, he had hoped that such a revelation could have been followed by a confession of a slightly different kind. He had never imagined he could fall in love with someone that wasn’t Jongdae, nor that he would tell Jongdae about that love. But life had several ways to surprise you, Baekhyun thought. Jongdae, though, didn’t look very much surprised at the news.

“You knew?” Baekhyun asked him, voice tight and small.

“I suspected.”

Baekhyun nodded. _Did you also know about me loving you?_ he wanted to ask but didn’t.

“Do you believe me, then?” _Do you believe that I would have never intentionally abandoned you and my children?_

“Do I believe that you met a supernatural being inside a magical cave and that you ended up falling in love with him, only for that being to betray your trust and hold you captive for a month?”

Baekhyun winced. Distracted by Jongdae’s tale and the pain it had filled him with, he had momentarily forgotten about Chanyeol’s role in all of this.

 _Betrayal_. Was that what it had been? Had Chanyeol kept him away from his family on purpose? Somehow, he couldn’t reconcile his Chanyeol with the image that Jongdae’s words had painted of him. Jongdae didn’t know Chanyeol; he didn’t know the color of his eyes under the sun, nor the freckles on the bridge of his nose. He didn’t know the sound of his laugh nor that of his moans.

Jongdae didn’t know how much Baekhyun loved Chanyeol. Chanyeol surely must had had a reason for doing what he did. Baekhyun _needed_ him to have had a reason, because, otherwise… Otherwise, he didn’t know how he could live with himself, knowing he had loved someone who didn’t seem to cherish that love as much as he did.

“Baekhyun.”

Jongdae’s voice interrupted Baekhyun’s influx of thoughts.

“I want to believe you. I will trust your words and… I will trust what my eyes have seen.” At Baekhyun’s inquisitive sound, he continued, “After you left, I searched your tent for clues.” Jongdae’s eyes seemed to say, _Tell me off for it, I dare you_. Baekhyun didn’t say a word. “I didn’t find much.” He stopped, shook his head. “I didn’t find _anything_ , to be honest. I was about to give up when Kyungsoo showed me something.”

“Kyungsoo? What did he show you?” Baekhyun couldn’t remember having left anything worth being examined inside his tent. He had always been careful not to bring anything suspicious back from the garden, and the flower he used to go back and forth was safe in his bag. So what had Kyungsoo shown Jongdae? Unless…

“Fruits. Of a kind I had never seen before. Kyungsoo told me you had brought them back from somewhere for your children to enjoy, and told them not to show them to anyone. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand where you had found such things. I asked your children about it and they told me it had been going on for a while, you feeding them unknown fruits. Unfortunately, this discovery didn’t help me in figuring out your whereabouts, but now I understand. There was no way I could have found you, was it? Not when someone much more powerful than me wanted to keep you hidden. He must have covered all your traces, for the dogs not being able to find the entrance to that garden of delights. And Balam, too… I had wondered about him, about why he wasn’t coming back home. Your lover must have prevented it, somehow.”

Heart growing heavier and heavier, Baekhyun thought back on Balam’s behavior of that morning. But had it really been that morning? Or had it started days ago and he had just never noticed? He recalled Chanyeol’s words, his denial about having noticed something weird with Balam, but, if Jongdae was speaking the truth – and Baekhyun knew he was, Jongdae would never lie to him –, then… then Chanyeol had lied.

Baekhyun felt so confused, destabilized. But there was one thing he had to do before he could think of a solution to their problems.

“Jongdae, take me to my children.”

Baekhyun cleaned himself up a bit before Jongdae led him to Junmyeon’s tent. He didn’t want to scare them unnecessarily, but who was he kidding? His children would probably be scarred for life because of his disappearance. He didn’t know where he could start to ask for forgiveness. Everything he knew, at that moment in time, was that he needed them in his arms, he needed to hug them and reassure them that their father would never leave them again.

Jongdae went inside Junmyeon’s tent before Baekhyun; when they came out, Junmyeon’s face was as pale as snow. Baekhyun wondered if he should prepare himself to be punched again.

Unexpectedly, Junmyeon turned to Jongdae and demanded, “You will explain to me everything that happened. Right now.”

“I will. But first, let me speak to the children. It’s better not to let them see Baekhyun without talking to them first.” And went back inside.

No matter how one thought about it, explaining the entire situation to little children was not easy. There wasn’t a right or a wrong way; one could only hope that doing their best would be enough. Baekhyun trusted Jongdae implicitly and he knew he would use with them gentle and simple words, trying to prevent them from any harm.

While they waited, Junmyeon wasn’t even looking at Baekhyun in the eyes. He was standing a short distance away from him, his arms crossed, his frowning gaze fixed on the tent’s flaps. Baekhyun tried to find words to say to him, but, in the end, all he could say was, “I’m sorry.”

Stiffly, Junmyeon nodded.

“And thank you for taking care of my children.”

At those words, Junmyeon’s posture relaxed a bit, and, finally, he threw a glance in Baekhyun’s direction. “Don’t make them cry again, Baekhyun. They have cried enough tears to last them a lifetime.”

Just then, a childish voice crying _“Daddy!”_ could be heard inside the tent. Baekhyun couldn’t resist anymore and rushed inside.

That evening, Baekhyun, Jongdae, and Junmyeon found themselves in Junmyeon’s tent. They figured it would be easier to talk there, after having put the children to bed – which had not revealed to be an easy feat: they had all clung to Baekhyun like chicks to their hen, refusing to let him go. Even Narae and Kyungsoo, who had initially been reluctant to trust that Baekhyun was really back (and hadn’t that hurt more than a knife in the heart), had, in the end, found refuge in Baekhyun’s arms.

They had eaten what little food they could spare and were then drinking some kumis, to help keep themselves warm.

Words of Baekhyun’s return had soon spread across the camp, and a few of the remaining people had come to Junmyeon’s tent to see with their own eyes if it was true. Baekhyun hadn’t expected to be welcomed back with open arms, not after what had happened, but he had not expected to be welcomed with such open resentment, either. It seemed that the trust people had placed in him had been replaced by anger and suspicion.

In contrast, it was apparent how much the people had come to rely on Jongdae’s leadership. Clearly, it was time for Baekhyun to step back from his role as a leader. He was happy that Jongdae would take his place; he had always been well-respected in their clan and his kind ways hid a steel core of righteousness that could not be bent. He would be the perfect leader and Baekhyun was willing to follow his directions from now on. But first, he had to try one last time to steer his clan away from the stormy waters they had found themselves in.

“What is the plan?” Baekhyun asked.

“Going back south before the weather turns even worse. There is still not a lot of snow on the ground, we need to take advantage of that. We have waited far too long.” What Jongdae didn’t say was that they had waited far too long for Baekhyun to be found.

Swallowing back his guilt – there would be a time and a place to wallow in it –, Baekhyun shook his head. “Still, it is too dangerous. With so little food and almost no animals, we will be too weak to walk for a long while, especially if we need to bring our belongings on our backs. We don’t how much longer the weather will hold up, either. It could start snowing hard while we are still on the road.”

Junmyeon scoffed. “You think we don’t know that? But what’s the alternative? Sitting here waiting for the cold and the hunger to kill us all?”

“Junmyeon.”

“No, Jongdae, I’m sorry, but I won’t stay silent, not on this. We are out of food, out of supplies. How much longer do you think we can resist here? If we leave now we might still have a chance at survival.”

“I know your position on the matter, Junmyeon. But I’d still like to listen to what Baekhyun has to say.”

“Very well. I will see myself out then. Tell me when you are done, so that I can go back to sleep in my tent. The one you are occupying right now, in case you forgot,” Junmyeon spat out and stomped out.

Jongdae sighed, one hand massaging his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Junmyeon… Junmyeon has been under a lot of pressure, trying to save as many people as he could. The last weeks have been hard on him.” He paused. “Have been hard on all of us.” His eyes lost themselves inside his memories.

Baekhyun had to stop himself from telling him _I’m sorry_ once again. Empty words that couldn’t help anyone. What Baekhyun needed was for Jongdae to listen to the plan he had come up with.

“Jongdae, listen to me. I know I have no right to ask this of you, but let me help you. There might be a way for us all to survive this without risking our lives.”

“What is it?”

“Let me go back to the garden. I will ask Chanyeol for help.”

Convincing Jongdae of the soundness of his plan hadn’t been easy. And how could it have been when Baekhyun himself had doubts? He was still reeling from what Chanyeol had done, he couldn’t seem to be able to wrap his mind around it, too hard to reconcile what he knew about Chanyeol with the new image his actions and Baekhyun’s doubts had depicted.

Jongdae had perfectly voiced all the qualms that had been clattering Baekhyun’s mind since he had first thought of that solution.

_How can you trust someone who has held you captive against your will? How do you know we can put our lives in his hands? What if he traps you again and this time forever?_

Of course, Baekhyun knew all of this. He was perfectly aware of how reckless his plan sounded, but what alternatives did they have? It was his fault his people had found themselves in that terrible situation. He had been the one to convince them to spend the winter in a new place, for his own selfish reasons. It had been his disappearance that had forced them to wait longer than necessary before leaving the new place behind. He would be the one to find a solution to their problems, he owned them at least that.

After a lot of reassurances, Jongdae had acquiesced; Baekhyun would leave for Chanyeol’s garden the next morning and would try to convince him to let his clan spend the winter there. If Baekhyun wouldn’t be back within a day they would leave without him.

Baekhyun knew the risks; but he also knew that he needed to do this, for himself and his clan. Maybe for Chanyeol, too. He needed to see him again, he needed to know _why_ he had felt necessary to do what he had done.

Baekhyun’s love was unwavering, but one should never trust a lover’s heart.

The forest felt different. Eerily silent, dark, and gloomy. Voice caught in his throat, Baekhyun didn’t find in himself the courage to call out for Chanyeol as he usually did, preferring, instead, to wander around in search of his lover.

He was suddenly reminded of the first time he had walked in Chanyeol’s garden, so scared of every little shadow. That day was not much different; the forest felt, once again, alien and unwelcoming. Despite all of this, Baekhyun kept walking on, resolute. He might have been afraid of what lurked in this forest once, but he had never been afraid of Chanyeol. He needed to find him and talk to him, and quickly.

He hastened his pace and soon the trees thinned out and a small glade appeared in front of him. There, sitting between the roots of a huge oak, was Chanyeol; his head was resting on his folded arms, placed upon his raised knees. Baekhyun briefly wondered if he was asleep, but, as soon as he stepped closer to the tree, Chanyeol lifted his head and Baekhyun’s breath caught in his chest.

Tears were falling from Chanyeol’s eyes, tracing the roundness of his cheeks and dripping on his sleeve-covered arms, staining the once pristine cloth. He was utterly beautiful.

Seeing Baekhyun, his eyes opened wide in disbelief and he croaked, “Baekhyun, you are back.”

He stumbled to his feet and crossed the meadow, falling into Baekhyun’s arms. “I thought you would never come back,” Chanyeol blubbered, his tears soaking Baekhyun’s shirt. “I woke up and you were gone and I was frantic with worry! I didn’t understand how you had gotten away!”

He raised his head and his lovely eyes bored accusingly in Baekhyun’s. “I had to ask the bunnies to tell me what had happened to you! The _bunnies_ , Baekhyun! And that hawk, I knew he was up to no good! Where is he, I need to have a word with him!” He was so incensed his face was slowly turning red, the color high on his cheeks and nose. It would have been a precious sight, Baekhyun thought, if not for what those words had revealed.

Chanyeol was perfectly aware of having kept Baekhyun captive, not so much of the wrongness of his deed.

Swallowing heavily, feeling as if his heart was getting chipped away bit by bit, Baekhyun forced himself to let go of Chanyeol and stepped back, his arms falling at his sides. Chanyeol was still blabbering away, something to do with birds and their nosiness and _maybe Baekhyun should think about knocking some sense into that friend of his_ , when Baekhyun froze him on the spot with his words.

“Chanyeol, I need to talk to you.”

“Oh? Aren’t you going to kiss me first?” he asked impishly.

Baekhyun shook his head. Feeling that something was wrong, Chanyeol dropped the playful act and nodded. “Alright then, let’s talk.”

They sat together under the oak tree; in the silence that preceded their conversation, Baekhyun became aware that the forest was once again filled with noise. Birds were trilling on the trees, and the patter of small paws could be heard in the undergrowth. The forest was attuned to Chanyeol’s mood, Baekhyun realized. Glancing at his lover, he saw that a light smile was painting his lips while his fingers played with Baekhyun’s own, their hands clasped together and resting in Chanyeol’s lap. Baekhyun hadn’t been able to deny him that comfort, despite the sickness he felt in his stomach.

And that had been the problem from the start, hadn’t it? Him not being able to deny Chanyeol anything he wanted.

“Why did you do it?” Baekhyun blurted out, unable to keep silent any longer.

Chanyeol froze beside him. “What—what did I do?”

Baekhyun didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that point. The only thing he knew was that he felt too tired to get angry.

“You kept me here against my will for an entire month while my family was suffering back home. Do you understand now?”

“How was that against your will, Baekhyun? I merely fulfilled your wish!” Chanyeol had no right to feel so outraged in Baekhyun’s opinion.

“My wish? Chanyeol, I was half-asleep! And of course, I didn’t mean it like that! You very well knew I had children at home and people that depended on me, how could you think I would abandon them like that!”

Chanyeol rose to his feet. “How is that my problem, Baekhyun? Yes, of course, I knew about your family, but I thought you had finally came back to your senses and understood that living here with me was a far better option than keeping going back to those other humans.”

“Other humans? Chanyeol, that is my family you are talking about.”

“And am I not your family too?”

Once, Baekhyun would have answered _yes_ without thinking about it twice.

A few heartbeats and Chanyeol’s face fell. He nodded and straightened his back. When he rose his head, he was a whole different person. “If this is how things are then why did you come back?”

“Chanyeol, please, don’t be like this.” Baekhyun got to his feet but didn’t go closer to Chanyeol.

“You went back to your family,” Chanyeol spat, “you could have stayed there. What more do you want from me?”

Why was he being so unreasonable, Baekhyun wondered. There was something more to this entire story. It was as if… as if talking about Baekhyun’s family had awakened something deeply hidden inside Chanyeol’s heart. A thorn embedded in his chest that Baekhyun had just recklessly twisted and turned. Still, there was no way around it. He needed to ask him for help and he needed to do it quickly. He prayed to the Goddess that Chanyeol would listen.

“I need your help.”

The look that crossed Chanyeol’s eyes spoke of the care he still held Baekhyun in. It was gone in a blink, forcefully smothered. Thus, Chanyeol’s voice spoke of barely repressed hurt. “So that’s why you came back,” he murmured. “Just to ask for my help.” He smiled a self-deprecating smile. “In your perspective, you believe I deserve it, isn’t that right? If you hadn’t needed me, you would have never come back.”

Baekhyun wished to take him in his arms, to console him; he wished he had the time to let his heart forgive him. He wished so many things for the two of them. He wished things would have never come to this.

“Alright then,” Chanyeol said. “I will grant you this last wish. Let it not be said that I don’t help those I keep near in my heart. We can say goodbye after that; I promise I won’t bother you again. What do you need help for?”

Swallowing heavily, Baekhyun answered. “My family is dying.”

He pretended not to see the malicious intent gathering at the corners of Chanyeol’s mouth.

Baekhyun continued, “many—most of our animals are dead. The clan was split in two and of those who have remained, some have died from sickness too. There are only a few of us remaining, ten adults and four children.” He stopped to take a deep breath. “Please, Chanyeol, allow us to take refuge inside your sanctuary for the winter. I promise they are all good people, they won’t hurt—”

Chanyeol’s deafening laughter interrupted him and Baekhyun felt his heart drop to his stomach.

“Oh, Baekhyun, my love.” In a couple of quick steps, he stood in front of Baekhyun and cupped his face between his hands. “I didn’t make you so naïve.” He was smiling, but there was nothing sweet about it. Languidly, he moved his hands from Baekhyun cheeks to his shoulders, and then he pushed him hard, making him fall at his feet.

“You dare come to me asking to help your family,” Chanyeol said with spite. “You take me for a fool promising they wouldn’t hurt the creatures under my charge. Do you think I don’t know what humans are made of? Do you think I don’t know the horrendous deeds they are capable of?!”

He was beautiful even in his anger. As powerful and terrifying as a bolt of lightning falling too close to home.

“Chanyeol, please, I don’t know why you hate us so much, but I’m begging you—”

“And what am I supposed to do with your pleas?”

Baekhyun had never felt so desperate in his entire life. How was he supposed to make Chanyeol understand?

“I have a duty to protect my people!” he yelled.

“And I have a duty to protect this place!”

Stalemate.

They were both breathing hard, color high on their cheeks. But while Baekhyun was begging for his people’s lives in desperation and fear, pain and anger had taken hold of Chanyeol’s heart, and a nymph’s heart was not easily swayed, neither in love nor in hate. 

“If you hate humans so much, why did you let me come here then? Why did you let me stay!”

Chanyeol didn’t answer.

Baekhyun wouldn’t cry, not again. He swallowed back all the sorrow he wished to scream to the world, and got back to his feet.

“Was it all a lie then? The love we felt for each other.”

“We were both lonely. We just happened to find each other at the right time.”

Baekhyun nodded, a sheen of tears veiling his eyes. “Even so, didn’t we share precious time together? Even if you don’t love me anymore, even if you never did, I still do. Can you not honor that love, Chanyeol?” He stepped closer to Chanyeol, catching his hand in his own. It was cold. “Chanyeol, please. Just for the winter, just for a few months. I swear on Our Goddess, they won’t hurt those you are protecting.”

“You swear on Our Goddess.”

Suddenly, a strong wind lashed out around them, the tree branches groaning under its strength.

“Baekhyun, Our Goddess… you killed her.” Chanyeol was laughing once again. In the past, Baekhyun would have never thought to describe his laughter as terrible.

“What—what are you saying?”

“Oh, this is too funny! Why do you think I hate humans so much, Baekhyun? Why do you think I don’t want them to step inside this place?” The hand that Baekhyun was weakly holding in his own suddenly grabbed his fingers with violence, and Baekhyun couldn’t escape his grip, though he tried.

Chanyeol got closer and whispered in Baekhyun’s ear, “All the fairy tales you tell yourselves, of the dark gods and their hunger, of Our Goddess falling asleep… Those are all lies, Baekhyun. There are no dark gods in this world,” he chuckled darkly. “The Goddess is dead and you can only blame yourselves for it.”

Chanyeol kissed him on the forehead and harrowing images flooded Baekhyun’s mind.

_Cities as big as mountains crossed by metal carriages spewing venomous smoke in the air; people, people everywhere, running around like hungry locusts, devouring everything on their way. Skies as dark as coal, as if they were promising rain, but no, not rain, they were filled with venom, too. Troubled waters, dead fish floating on their surface. Dead animals with bloated stomachs. Fire destroying everything, forests, homes, lives. Men gloating, men despairing for their lives, money that cannot buy food or clean water. War. Death, death everywhere._

_Silence._

Baekhyun woke up with a gasp.

Rolling over on his stomach, he dry-heaved on the grass. Trembling violently, he dragged himself away from Chanyeol, trying to put as much distance as possible between him and the dreadful things he had seen. He could not think clearly, his mind paralyzed by terror.

“Do you understand now, Baekhyun?” Chanyeol asked, voice deceptively soft. “I am born of nature; the Goddess was my Mother. Why would I care about the fate of your people?”

It was Baekhyun’s turn to laugh in despair. “Aren’t we made of nature too?” he cried. “Aren’t we made of flesh and blood like the animals you are defending? If you won’t let us in you will have the blood of innocents on your hands, Chanyeol! Is that what you want?!”

His ancestors might have killed the Mother, but Baekhyun’s people had no fault in that.

“Is it revenge that you want, then? Take it out on me!” Baekhyun yelled, getting to his feet. He rushed over to Chanyeol and grabbed him by the collar of his robe, shaking him. “Kill me, and let my people live!”

The mask of disdain Chanyeol had been wearing cracked under the weight of Baekhyun’s words. As much as he could hate humanity, as much as he could wish them all dead, killing Baekhyun was inconceivable. “I won’t make you a sacrifice for your people, Baekhyun!” he shouted.

“Then what would you have me do!” Baekhyun cried, now sobbing uncontrollably. “Please, tell me, tell me what to do. Tell me—”

Chanyeol gathered him in his arms, holding him tightly. Baekhyun couldn’t help but return the embrace, seeking comfort from whom had hurt him in the first place.

“I will take you and your children in. I know your heart, and children can still learn to love and respect Our Mother’s creation. That is all I can do, Baekhyun. That is all I can do.”

Baekhyun walked home in a daze. Images of the destruction Chanyeol had shown him were overlapping with those of the people he had left behind at the camp, and with images of what the future would bring them. He had never felt more tired. His heart broken in a thousand pieces, he felt empty, bereft.

He spoke to Jongdae in hushed whispers; he had no strength for anything more. Jongdae’s resignation in response to his words didn’t hurt much. He didn’t think he had enough heart left to be hurt.

He went back to his children and hugged them tightly. He played with them and kissed them a thousand times. He made a game out of packing their things and promised them an adventure: the next day, they would go to the place where their father had picked the golden fruits and they would eat them until their tummies were full and could no more.

That night, he didn’t sleep a wink.

“You are back.”

Baekhyun nodded. “I am.”

Baekhyun would have delighted in the expressions of awe and wonder painted on his children’s faces at the sight of Chanyeol and his forest, had the situation been any different. Instead, he only felt numb.

“Daddy! Birdie!” That was Jongin, his pudgy finger raised to point at a lovely blue bird perched on the branch of the nearest tree. Baekhyun smiled down at him and caressed his head. Narae and Sehun were feeling particularly shy, as they always were in front of strangers, and stood behind Baekhyun, spying Chanyeol by behind his legs.

Kyungsoo was scrutinizing Chanyeol with his unreadable gaze, a bit wary maybe, but not overly so. “Dad said that you have a lot of fruits here, is that true?”

Taken aback by his bluntness, Chanyeol blinked and nodded his head. Then, Kyungsoo beamed and turned to his Dad. “Dad! It’s true!”

“What, you didn’t trust me, little guy? I told you there were, didn’t I?” He laughed a bit, trying to mask his pain. “Let’s go then, Chanyeol will show us his best fruit trees.”

Chanyeol and Baekhyun walked side by side; Sehun and Narae were still walking a bit behind Baekhyun, but he knew their curiosity would soon be enough to let them out of their shell. Jongin was riding on Baekhyun’s shoulders, his little fingers gripping chunks of Baekhyun’s hair and pulling them one direction or another as soon as something caught his attention. Kyungsoo, unexpectedly, was jogging along Chanyeol – his short legs barely keeping up with Chanyeol’s wide stride –, seemingly fascinated by him. Balam was following them from above: he had been quite hesitant about following them inside the tunnel once again, mindful of what had happened to Baekhyun, but Jongin’s gentle touches and encouraging words, spoken with a level of affection only a child could master, had reassured him into coming along with them.

Soon after, they reached the orchard; as Baekhyun remembered, the trees were full of fruits of any kind: golden apples, bright red cherries, pink peaches, it was a feast for the eyes. At the sight of the trees, the children let out trills of joy and ran ahead, jumping up and down below the groaning branches, trying to grab with their little hands the fruits that had grown closer to the ground.

Wish a snap of Chanyeol’s fingers, the branches were slowly lowered so that the children could easily reach them; gasping in disbelief, they hurried to grab as much as they could, stuffing their faces with greed. The sight brought a smile to Baekhyun’s face; he knew then that his children would live well in that magical place.

It didn’t take long for the children to fall asleep, their tummies full and their cheeks stained with juice. Resting as they were under the shadow of the orchard trees, Baekhyun thought they looked like little fairies, right at home among the flowers and the buzzing bees.

He didn’t know how to say goodbye.

With a trembling sigh, he lowered to the ground the bag he had been carrying on his back, full of his children’s meager possessions: a few toys, some clothes, something to remember their father by. He had promised himself he would not cry, not in front of the children. But now that the children were asleep, he couldn’t help but let a few tears escape his eyes.

He took in for the last time the sleeping forms of his children, trying to burn in his mind every tiny detail: the mole on Narae’s cheek; Sehun’s strong eyebrows; Kyungsoo’s heart-shaped lips; Jongin’s dimple, visible because the little boy had fallen asleep with a smile on his face. Baekhyun wanted to go to them, to kiss and hug them one last time, to ask them to forgive him, to ask them to remember he loved them and always would, but he knew that if he touched them for one last time he would never find the courage to let them go.

“Goodbye,” he whispered. “I love you.” And, turning his back on his children, he went back the way they had come, Chanyeol following silently behind.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay?” There was resignation in Chanyeol’s words as if he already knew the answer to his question. At Baekhyun’s sad nod, he sighed and nodded with him. “I expected that. So self-sacrificing,” he murmured.

When Baekhyun stopped, they were at the opening of the tunnel. Balam, who had been following them closely, landed on top of Baekhyun’s outstretched arm. Baekhyun petted his head with his fingertips, a melancholy smile on his lips. “For us, too, has come the moment to say goodbye, my old friend. Please, will you take care of my children for me?” Balam cooed in response, pecked Baekhyun’s hand one last time, and then took flight, going back, Baekhyun imagined, to the orchard where his children slept.

“That’s a relief,” Baekhyun said. Swiftly, he took off the leather protection he wore on his left arm and offered it to Chanyeol. “Will you give this to the children? I won’t need it anymore, after all.” At Chanyeol’s hesitation, Baekhyun grabbed him and fastened the vambrace around his arm. “Here,” he said, then he stopped, his hand still around Chanyeol’s arm.

“Sehun and Jongin are afraid of bugs. Narae is grumpy in the morning if she doesn’t get enough sleep. Kyungsoo bites his nails when he is nervous, I’ve been trying to make him stop but he started to chew his lips instead. They are not difficult children, but sometimes Sehun likes to throw a tantrum or two because he is jealous of his siblings.” He took a deep breath. “Jongin sometimes gets really clingy,” Baekhyun choked out. “He likes cuddling and playing with his doll. Kyungsoo can be a bit mulish, but once you reason with him you’ll see how smart he is. And Narae, Narae is the sweetest little girl you will ever meet, she likes weaving flower crowns, she will like living here.”

“Baekhyun…”

“Please don’t—don’t be cruel to them.”

“I won’t.”

“Can you promise?”

“I promise.” Tentatively, Chanyeol caressed Baekhyun’s cheek. “You could stay here with us.”

Baekhyun shut his eyes and shook his head, freeing his mind from the images those tempting words were conjuring. “I can’t. I need to go back. Let me go, Chanyeol.” _Forget about me_ , he wanted to say. _Let me forget about you_.

Sighing in defeat, Chanyeol did just that. He was crying too, Baekhyun noticed. Was all this suffering worth the brief glimpse of love he had experienced with him?

“Take this,” Chanyeol told him. He was offering Baekhyun a small bag tied at the top with a green vine. Baekhyun almost smiled, remembering the day they had first met.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Seeds. They,” Chanyeol stopped, closing his eyes, trying to get the lump in his throat not to hurt so much. “They will grow quickly once you plant them. They won’t need a lot of care. Fruit trees, vegetables, some medical plants. I hope—I hope they will help you. You… you and your family,” he concluded, eyes downcast.

Baekhyun had to kiss him one last time: despite the harsh words that had been exchanged between them, Chanyeol was giving him and his people a chance at survival. Things wouldn’t be easier for a while and a dangerous journey still awaited them with no guarantee they would make it, but Chanyeol’s gift had lighted a small ember of hope in Baekhyun’s heart.

“Goodbye, Chanyeol,” he said against his mouth, their lips brushing against each other at every word. “Thank you, I’m sorry, I love you.”

With the memory of those last words breathed against Chanyeol’s lips, he returned to the surface and never once turned back.


	5. EPILOGUE

Inside a small hut in the middle of an orchard, a man was praying on his knees in front of a small altar. On it, a statue of a Goddess bearing fruits, and a flower, purple and golden, brought as an offering.

Voices were coming from outside the man’s home and he smiled, content. He finished his prayer and stood up, wobbling a bit on his feet. His knees were aching again, he found. Not even forty yet, and he already felt like an old man.

Once outside, he shielded his eyes from the burning light of the sun that was so strong on their plains. He wished good morning to those he met on the way to the vegetable garden, a wicker basket in his hand. He picked some beans and a few potatoes, enough to last him for a few days.

When he was ready to go back home, he made a slight detour, walking deeper into the orchard trees. Some were in bloom, some already bearing fruits.

At the center of the orchard stood a persimmon tree.

In all the years since it had first been planted, it had never borne flowers or fruits. It had always stood there, silent and bare but for its leaves, waiting. For what, the man didn’t know.

Just as he was turning away to go back home, he spied, with the corner of his eye, a tiny, light yellow flower on one of the branches, almost hidden by the foliage. Stunned, the man let his basket fall to the ground and ran closer to the tree to better gaze at that small miracle.

Eyes filled with joy, laugh lines evident on his handsome face, he smiled softly as he remembered, with a slight pang in his chest, happier times.

He stood under that tree for a long while, lost in his memories. Finally, with one last sigh, he stooped to gather what he had dropped and moved to go back home. Just then, a gust of wind made the leaves tremble.

They sounded like they were speaking. They sounded like they were calling Baekhyun’s name.

Quickly, Baekhyun turned on the spot, almost stumbling. He could hear someone giggling; he would recognize that sound in a million.

“Chanyeol…” he whispered, tentative. His heart was dancing madly in his chest. He listened in silence, but, when he heard no more, he shook his head in reprimand. He was truly becoming an old man, hearing the voices of people he had long lost. He hit himself on the forehead and ordered his heart to calm down, lest Jongdae found him dead by a stroke in the middle of their fruit grove.

Suddenly, he heard those giggles again; that time, the sound came from behind him. Swallowing heavily, he couldn’t find in himself the courage to turn and look.

“Aren’t you going to say hi to an old friend?”

Baekhyun gasped and turned around; standing right in front of him was Chanyeol, the lover he had tried for so many years to forget, but that he had never been able to. He was more beautiful than Baekhyun remembered, with his golden skin and raven locks, with his eyes that sparkled of the light of a thousand stars. He hadn’t aged a day since the last time Baekhyun had seen him.

Chanyeol was smiling warmly but shyly as if he didn’t know how his sudden appearance would be received. He took a few tentative steps towards Baekhyun but stopped before he got too close.

Baekhyun was left gaping, unable to believe what his eyes were seeing. “Are—are you really here?” he asked. “How,” he gulped, “how are you here?”

Chanyeol raised his eyes to the persimmon tree. “When I gave you that bag full of seeds, I put in a few from my own tree. Remember? I was born from a tree just like this one,” he said, pointing. “When I felt it blooming, I was finally able to reach you.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

Chanyeol chuckled, and oh, how much had Baekhyun missed that sound, despite everything that had happened between them, despite the years that had separated them.

“I was stuck inside that cave because of my brother’s magic that tied me to my tree. But now that this tree bloomed, I am able to get out at will. That tree is still my own, but I came in search of my heart if he would still have me.”

Chanyeol looked so earnest, so sincere; he had something in him Baekhyun didn’t remember from their past. Then, his words registered in Baekhyun’s mind, and he couldn’t help but blush, thrown off center.

“You—you still want me? Even if I look like this?” And why was that the only thing Baekhyun could come up with? Why not ask about more important things, why not talk like real adults?

Chanyeol pouted. “I think you look very distinguished. But if that is a problem for you, I can make myself look older without any problem. Look!”

But before he could snap his fingers, Baekhyun’s hands closed around his, stopping him. “No! No, there is no need! Chanyeol, please, what—what are you doing here?”

Chanyeol looked at him with fondness. “I came here because I love you. I came here to beg for your forgiveness. I wronged you in the past, so much so that I am ashamed of myself. I was ready to grovel at your feet if that would have convinced you to stay, but you never came back.”

 _Of course I didn’t_ , Baekhyun thought. _That was my punishment. And then… then there was a clan to rebuild and by then, when we finally found peace again, it was too late. With what face could I have gone back to you and my children, after so many years had passed without a word?_

“I have your children to thank for that,” Chanyeol continued. “I will never be too fond of humans, but they showed me how beautiful humanity can be.”

“Are they well?” Baekhyun asked, trembling.

“They are. They can’t wait to see you again.”

The first few tears escaped from Baekhyun’s eyes, but they were tears of happiness.

“Take me to them, Chanyeol. Take me back home.”

With a smile, Chanyeol did just that.


End file.
